


Reconstruction

by Marie_L



Series: Angelo's family [4]
Category: The Pretender
Genre: Adolescence, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Captivity, F/M, Synesthesia, Telepathy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-18
Updated: 2016-10-06
Packaged: 2018-04-10 00:21:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 35,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4369973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marie_L/pseuds/Marie_L
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jarod's family races to free him after he's recaptured by the Centre, while Gemini experiences freedom for the first time.</p><p>First chapter is the history of Emily, from her POV.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Wherever they may find her

**Author's Note:**

> So I intended this chapter to just be a little Emily history and a recap of the previous stories, and it turned into the mega-long thing. The other chapters will not be so long, but it does bring the readers up to speed, if you haven't read the other stories in the series.

As a child, the walls of Emily's life were defined by two things: _The outside world will hurt you. There are_ _demons_ _that will take you._ From the instant she was born her world was constrained by her parents' fear, which naturally was subsumed into fear of her own. Even before she knew the story of her brothers, stolen by monsters in the night, her mother enveloped her as the only safe place in the universe. _Inside_ was protection, safety, the love of both parents and Christ's, _outside_ was contamination, pain, foulness and sin.

It looked lovely from the window, though. All the colors that slowly changed with God's seasons, and a kind old man with a young child who tended the flowers. The boy was a child of God, she could tell somehow, simple but loving. Her sense of the boy was the first indication of her special talent at reading people, although it was not the last, and she didn't even know it was unique yet. Sometimes they waved at each other through the window, before the grandfather hushed him.

Emily learned to read practically before she learned to speak, for her parents didn't do a great deal of talking. What was there to talk about, trapped within the confines of two rooms for all your days? There were always books, though, brought by Sister Harriet. A children's Bible was always there, of course, telling the stories of the ancients with helpful watercolor photos every other page. Sister Harriet, though, brought in many more on a rotating basis – stories of Elves and Dwarves, of a submarine exploring the fantastical creatures under the sea, of families shipwrecked on deserted islands, of a little girl falling into a wondrous and nonsensical land. The books were all stamped with the names magical realms, too, like clues on a hidden treasure map: _Mondor-Eagen Library at Anna Maria College, Property of Boston College,_ _Saint Anselm College Geisel Library._

Her favorite was the one about a spoiled and lonely girl sent to live with her cruel uncle, and who discovers a sickly cousin locked away from the world. Together they discover and explore a hidden garden, and the ill young man slowly recovers with love and friendship. Emily read the story over and over, enough that Sister Harriet later brought her a copy of the book without one of the mysterious college library stamps, and told her she could keep it forever. _Wouldn't it be wondrous,_ Emily thought _, to have a friend show up and unlock all the doors._ If she could explore even the garden below the window, that would be enough. But of course the door could never be unlocked, lest the demons find her.

As she grew older her language skills grew too, and the books became more complex. With her mother she read books in the realm of the spirit: the real Bible with all its strange inconsistencies, catechism, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Joan of Arc, Teresa of Avila. With her father, when he was back in the attic, she read books of the realm of the earth and air: Textbook of Aerodynamics, Vector Calculus, Principles of Thermodynamics, Organic Chemistry.

“Daddy, are molecules real?” Emily asked one day. Daddy's absences grew each time he left, but he always returned with new books and new lessons for when he would be gone again. That all these facts and arguments swimming in her head were supposed to represent reality had only recently dawned on her; previously she had been operating under the impression that they were all stories, with greater or lesser degrees of internal consistency.

“Yes, of course, honey,” her father replied. He sat up a little straighter in the familiar rocking chair, shifting from the pain in his back. “This is science. It's … well, proven isn't the right word, you can never one hundred percent prove something with the scientific method. But at least there's evidence.”

“As much evidence as for demons and the devil?” she asked. Those seemed more real than invisible little particles that somehow added up to chairs and windows and bedsheets. Chemistry had math, which was beautiful in its logic, but religion weighed like a living, breathing force. Her parents didn't live their lives according to the principles of _physics._

“Demons are just a myth, Em. Metaphors for evil in the world. Remember we talked about metaphors?”

“That's not what Momma says.” She did remember about metaphors, where something not-real represented something real but abstract. “Momma says they're real men who want to knock down our door.”

Daddy frowned. “The men are real, but they're not literal _demons._ They're still human beings, misguided, misinformed, maybe sometimes evil. Evil lurks within us all, you don't need to invent a mythical creature to explain it.”

“If I'm evil and you're evil and Momma's evil, why don't you let them take me to the evil place? Maybe I belong there.”

“No. They already have your brothers. You belong to us.”

Later that night, as Emily tried to sleep on her bedroll behind the partition in the second room, she could hear her parents arguing in the kitchenette. Arguing again, they fought more and more lately, when Daddy was there. He left through the locked doors all the time now, but Momma never did. Tonight, even from a distance Emily knew the dispute was over her and the demons-not-demons outside. Daddy wanted to leave, either fight directly or move somewhere far enough away they'd never find her. Momma was afraid. They hadn't discovered them yet at this location, so why play with hellfire? The Devil could already be seen on the horizon, just off the edges of the Earth through the windows.

The next day, Daddy handed her a new balsam wood puzzle, told her to take care of her mother, kissed her on the forehead and walked out the door.

He didn't come back for over a month.

Sister Harriet always dropped by once a week with essential supplies – food, toilet paper, soap, books. She seemed especially worried about them while Daddy was gone fighting monsters, but Emily wasn't worried. She knew how to do laundry, wash dishes, tidy up their tiny two rooms. She knew the correct chemistry to make dinner, and the correct incantations to keep the evil spirits from creeping too close to the door. She knew how to keep herself busy within her own mind, and how to take care of Momma when she couldn't get out of bed. What's to be concerned about?

“You are too grown up for a little girl,” Sister Harriet would tell her.

“How can you be too grown up?” Emily would ask. And Harriet would smile sadly and bring another book out of her bag, and Emily would describe for her all the adventures she had imagined from the books for the weeks before.

Sister Harriet would sit for hours with Momma, listening, holding her hand, coaxing her to the living room for even a short while. During her afflicted time of month, Harriet brought medicine for the pain, and helped change the blood-drenched laundry. That, too, had her worried, even though Emily could hardly remember a time when the full moon didn't cause the pads to overflow.

Secretly, Emily thought Momma was just like Colin, the sickly boy from the book who needed love and affection and the outside world to slowly come alive. But Momma would never leave the attic. Not while Emily was still there to protect. Like the saints of old, cloistered for the single dedicated purpose of a life for God, visions and all. Sometimes Emily wondered whether the souls of the saints breathed like her mother's, ethereal, one foot in the underworld.

The last time Sister Harriet arrived alone it was night, and Momma didn't want to let her in. “It's a trick,” she whispered, holding Emily tight. “They can fake voices, darling, I can tell.”

Outside Harriet began to rattle the door and shout. “Margaret! Open the door! I need to know that Emily is still safe! Let me in!”

“She thinks the Centre might have come, Momma,” Emily whispered. “We should at least tell her we're all right.”

“Lies!” hissed Momma. “Treachery and lies, I have to protect you.”

But Emily had a sense too, and she knew it was really Sister Harriet, not a demon. Plus she was hungry, for they had run out of peanut butter and apples and rice again. So she wormed her way out of her mother's arms despite the thrashing sobs, and ran to unlock the door. To her astonishment Momma followed, leaping out of bed and grabbing her hair back with a yank just as the door swung open.

Harriet didn't step over the threshold. “Margaret. Let her go.”

“Leave us, you foul thing. You can't have another child. My only child!”

Harriet's eyes shifted to Emily, who was gripped around the neck by her mother. “How long has she been like this?”

“Since nightfall.” Then Emily added, “But the demons come every night. Usually when you come up, we can still see out the windows.”

Sister Harriet sucked in a breath. Carefully she placed the bags of groceries just inside the door-jam without taking a step forward. “If I leave, will Margaret go back to bed?”

Momma hissed at the impertinent words, but in her arms Emily nodded yes.

“Do you think you are in danger? Time to be a grown-up, now, Emily, and tell me the truth.”

“No. Momma protects me. She would never deliberately hurt me.”

“All right, then. I'm leaving now, Margaret. No one is going to take your child.”

She closed the door, although Emily could somehow tell Harriet was still outside the door, listening hard. Momma loosened her grip, but she still muttered, “The children have already been taken,” over and over. After a long time standing there, Emily pulled her back to bed, and curled up in her trembling arms.

The next day Daddy finally returned with sad eyes, accompanied by two priests, Harriet, and another Sister, who in another life had been a nurse. The priests spoke in a strangely beautiful way. Even the priests weren't enough to quell her fear, though, and eventually they had to put Momma almost in a walking sleep to get her out of the barn attic. Then Daddy took her hand, and they too walked through the forbidden door.

Emily was seven years old.

 

* * * * *

After that, Emily lived with her father, but she also had to learn to live with people. They were smuggled across what Emily would later learn was the rural border between Canada and the United States, and settled north of Montréal. Sister Harriet bid them goodbye at the border, with a kiss and prayer for Margaret, and a brand new copy of _The Secret Garden_ for Emily to keep. She never saw her for another ten years.

Dad immediately enrolled her in semi-public French-speaking Catholic school, and the two of them carved out a something like a normal life in a tiny bungalow in the suburbs. Later Emily would reflect that it was a strange way to hide, placing an unsocialized flaming redhead in a foreign land with a foreign language. But the Centre didn't know what she looked like – baby pictures of both her brothers revealed her father's brown hair – and Dad somehow knew the language barrier wouldn't last long. Indeed within the space of a month, she went from absorbing melodic gibberish to spouting _français québécois_ slang with the rest of the kids.

The hardest adjustment for Emily wasn't the language, but all the people, regardless of the form of words coming out of their mouths. So many strange people; they were a psychic burden, as all those years of isolation left her with no instincts of how ordinary people operated. She could sense the basic personality of anyone she met: shy or aggressive, in peace or in pain, whatever good or evil lurked beneath the surface. These judgments came instantly, without conscious awareness that the knowledge was unusual, and at first she thought everyone just knew about other people as soon as they saw them. She developed a reputation as the preternatural child who knew everyone's secrets, although the content of people's minds was still a black void. Some people avoided her, others became her friends and fiercely defended her utter honesty.

For many years after the Tashman farm, she barely saw her mother. Margaret's mind was relatively stable in the gentle rhythm of the convent-attached convalescent home in which she was placed, but any reminder of her children tended to put her into a panic, and the demons arose anew. As a young girl Emily didn't mind her mother's terrified grip, for it was still a hug, still the loving touch she craved. But at some point she would always have to leave, go back to the normal life her father was trying to create for her in the outside world, and the parting inevitably triggered Margaret's hysteria and psychosis. So she wrote letters instead, telling her mother all about her friends, her hobbies, her books, everything that indicated she was leading a life of freedom and contentment, to remind Margaret that she was her own person, not the Centre's possession. And very slowly, Margaret's mental state improved. Not enough to go back to normal life as a wife and mother, but enough to be at peace.

Dad continued to research the Centre as she grew up, obsessively charting their organizational structure and activities. But he didn't take action, even though Kyle and Jarod were likely still being held in the depths of the Blue Cove complex. Too much risk, Charles later told her. After getting shot trying to assist the doomed Catherine Parker – and he still wasn't sure why they tossed him out the door and let him live, considering the wife of the director was slaughtered in an elevator – the Centre obviously knew who he was and had no qualms about using deadly force to protect their precious property.

Then, ten years after leaving Harriet Tashman's farm, the calculus changed yet again. Kyle escaped.

Harriet was no longer a Sister, but Kyle tracked her down anyway, leaving behind him trail of kidnappings and incoherent ravings and random cruel acts. Harriet didn't know the details of their resettlement but she knew the people who knew, and offered to put Kyle in contact with his family under controlled conditions. After all, who knew how the child kidnapped at age 18 months had been programmed? He responded by holding her at gunpoint and demanding she drive him straight to his parents. She responded by crashing the car not five miles into the journey north, right next to a police cruiser.

Charles never blamed Harriet for deciding to put his son's fate in the hands of yet another institution. They had made his son into a madman, and her life was at risk. But now that there was definitive proof that his sons were _alive,_ and psychologically tortured in some way, it renewed his obsession with the search for the last lost boy. And now Emily was old enough to join in the fight, not just sit around waiting to be picked up like a stray cat on the street.

A part of Emily suspected Jarod was dead, in mind if not in body, just like Kyle. If he were alive he was likely held in the bowels of the Blue Cove building, not far where Dad had been shot all those years ago. Major Charles had never found another way in, although he endlessly researched: architectural plans for the building, security annexes, subsidiary companies of The Centre's vast multinational organization. In theory Jarod could have been transferred to several other semi-secret locations – South Africa, France, Vietnam, Bangladesh – or the truly secret ones they likely built. But they had no evidence. Not a whisper of the genius grown man held captive for decades.

Emily did her part, off and on. In her most daring move she visited Kyle, on the down low posing as a research psychologist. A very _young_ psychologist, but Emily had already learned that the right attitude, and approaching the right people, and folks would believe. Dad would freak and forbid her to go, so she didn't tell him the plan in advance. Kyle was a dead end, Major Charles believed. He had skipped the trial of course, although he longed to see his long-lost baby boy, but obtained transcripts of the proceedings. It indicated to him that little Kyle was really and truly as insane as his actions indicated.

But Emily knew she could do it. She was the one that could read his soul, after all. Perhaps with more information about Jarod's project, they could follow leads from the Centre's public think tank activities. Obviously they were using Jarod for something, if he were still alive.

She was twenty-one years old.

Emily sat across the glass from the man that had kidnapped Harriet, and before either one of them spoke she knew it was hopeless. His soul had been brutally damaged, to the point he no longer had an identity, or possibly coherent memories from that identity. Still, she tried.

“What can you tell me about the Centre?” she asked softly, without introducing herself. Best not to beat around the bush; she might not have a lot of time.

His blue eyes widened by a fraction, and he studied her without twitching another muscle. She had dyed her hair brown and put on glasses for the encounter, hoping that would be enough to avoid tipping off the Centre. Even after all these years, Emily still doubted they knew what she looked like – in all honesty there was some doubt in her mind whether the Centre even knew she existed – but her natural color was similar enough to Margaret with her flaming red hair that she didn't take chances.

Finally he responded. “What do _you_ know of The Centre?” he croaked.

“I know they stole you as a baby. I know you had abilities they wanted to exploit. I know they broke you.”

“He _never_ broke me,” Kyle hissed.

Emily had to wonder who “he” was. Nevertheless she tipped her head and nonchalantly shrugged. “You don't even know who you are. Seems pretty broken to me.”

“I was competent enough to stand trial. I'm in jail, not in the looney bin.”

“Yeah? Then what's your name?”

His eyes rolled back as he withdrew a bit into his shell. “The names change. The occupations change. The _being_ changes. What does the original one matter?”

“It does matter, Kyle.” His eyes snapped back at her in grief and astonishment, but Emily could tell his fragile grip on reality was slowly disintegrating despite her deployment of the name. “What did they have you do at The Centre, Kyle?”

“Pretend. Make-believe. He was serious about the 'believe' part, too.” Kyle grimaced, his head dropping back in memory. “Murderer. Assassin. Rapist. Soldier. Engineer. Madman. Victim. You had to relive it all, believe it was really you. And then after awhile it _is_ you.”

“Did you ever know someone named Jarod at the Centre? As a boy, perhaps? Kyle, look at me, focus.” She tapped on the glass.

“Jarod. He said he was my friend, but then he hurt me. They made him hurt me, even with Sydney there. He was an excellent engineer. The best they had of all of us, at everything.”

“The best at what? Who is 'all of us'?”

“The Make-Believers. The Pretenders. Become anyone you want to be, but don't forget yourself, that's how you get into jail.”

“Why would they make you become different people?” Emily asked. There must be some tremendous gain to the Centre, to hold people prisoner for decades.

But Kyle simply laughed at that, as if it were the funniest question in the world. “Who are _you_ , bearer of the dead names Kyle and Jarod?”

“Harriet Tashman's demon slayer,” she replied.

Emily got up to leave at his astonished face, before the temptation to tell him everything overwhelmed her, and ground down what was left of Kyle Tully down to the last gritty bits of his soul. There was nothing she could do for her tortured brother in there.

* * * * *

They gained valuable information from Emily's daring visit, although Dad practically had a coronary when he found out about it. Point one, Jarod was alive and in the Centre's custody, at least in the decade or so after his kidnapping, confirming Catherine Parker's story. Point two, someone named Sydney was a handler for the boys. Last name or first name, they couldn't tell, but it gave them something to hunt for amidst all the pilfered personnel records. Point three, the project that the young genius minds had been warped towards all these years involved some kind of mental simulation of others. The Centre had been quietly funding psychological and neuropsych research for decades, among several other fields. Emily sat in university libraries with stacks of old journals and carefully followed the lines of evidence, starting all the way back in the forties and fifties.

For her personally, though, meeting Kyle had brought home an overarching point to Emily: The Centre wasn't the raving product of her mother's fractured mind, but it really _existed._ Her brothers, too, for in her mind they were often no more than smiling toddlers in an old photo. They were real people, trapped for their entire lives in some evil version of the attic, possibly demented and warped into something inhuman. They were her own private but-for-God-there-go-I, for she now knew in her gut that her parents had been right, and she would have been stolen straight from her cradle if it weren't for their efforts. Just like the demon changelings her mother warned about all those years ago, only the Centre never gave anything in return.

In any case, Emily slowly built up a picture of what had likely happened to Kyle and Jarod. Among other activities, the Centre was fairly well-known in certain circles for its forecasting and modeling. When the supercomputers of the world failed, it was rumored, the Centre could still divine an answer, seemingly from the blue. And some of the reports they acquired, sanitized as they were, bore the impression not of a cold machine but a human soul. Almost as if Emily were getting a read off the paper itself, not merely from a mind. They had tapped into her brother's latent genius, she suspected, exploiting it like a natural resource to be mined and drained down to the last economic drop.

It didn't help to know what to _do,_ however. Jarod was now in his thirties, and if they were still holding him prisoner, it was likely because he didn't _want_ to escape, or didn't have the mental capacity. Emily and Charles still couldn't break into an impenetrable fortress and kidnap back a grown man. They didn't even know if he was still called Jarod.

Slowly Emily let the search consume her, just as it did her father. A mystery to be solved, she could sense the solution just beyond her reach, buried in all that data. Her Dad finally took her to one side, glimpsing the mountains of reports and papers piled in her Montréal apartment.

“You need to go, Em. Do something else. We didn't save you just to let the Centre eat your life. You're young, go sit on a beach, climb a mountain, see new places, fall in love. Send me a postcard occasionally.”

“ _Really,_ Dad? Easily traceable postcards?”

“Fine, that newfangled email. I'll keep you updated on the search. And your mother. But you can't live your life in a dark room surrounded by dead words and dead souls. You've got a gift too, Emily, how will you ever learn how to use it unless you get out and meet people?”

“Where should I go?”

“Where do you want to go? Where have none of us ever been? I'm going to live vicariously through you, you know. At least one of my children deserves to be free.”

The next day she boarded up her apartment, prepaid for a year so her Dad could crash there whenever he wanted, and hopped on a plane to India. And although she did come back on occasion, without some sign that the status of her lost brother had changed, Emily vowed never to open a dusty report again.

* * * * *

Ten years after Kyle's abortive attempt to find his family, he escaped from prison. Emily kept flags on her “John Doe” of course, so immediately she left her current occupation – infiltrating an ashram cult in Oregon to gather evidence of abuse – to fly back to Quebec as support for her mother. The central dilemma of Kyle, whether to tell her broken older brother where to find his family or leave it be, had never been resolved. Emily didn't think her mother could take seeing her little boy driven insane, and maybe Kyle couldn't handle his broken mother, either. They also had evidence that officials from the Centre were still visiting Kyle in his cell, possibly to shore up his childhood programming. Emily hadn't met the young man long enough to tell whether his Stockholm Syndrome might cause him to run straight back to his captors at the first opportunity and tell them everything.

But that didn't happen.

Emily had left for a short lunch run when the phone call came in. Dad was stuck in South Africa, having hopped a freighter with the help of some old Navy friends. He was tracking down thin leads to the leadership of the Centre, and unavailable to return for at least 24 hours. So when Emily returned to find her mother riled up in a feverish excitement, it was all on her to make sense of the jumble of words.

“Harriet called… he's _alive_...my baby boy wants to come back… I said Boston … that cafe where your father and I used to meet … we can get down there by tomorrow, darling, I'm sure of it...”

Dread filled Emily at _my baby boy wants to come back._ “Who, Mom? You mean Kyle? Did you talk to Harriet herself?” It didn't make sense. Harriet would know not to leave a vital message only with Mom, but to wait until she or Dad got back in touch.

“No! Father Alain, relayed from St. Catherine's.”

Emily closed her eyes. Playing telephone with a madwoman. They'd probably tried to contact Dad at the old bungalow and failed. And who knew what was really going on down there in the States? Kyle might have had a knife to Harriet's throat as she made the call. “What exactly did he say, Mom? Kyle wants to meet us?”

“Not Kyle! Jarod!”

“Mom… Jarod's not the one that escaped. Remember? Kyle kidnapped Harriet, Kyle went on trial, and Kyle's the one who yesterday gave himself a get-out-of-jail-free card.”

“They said Jarod, darling, I'm sure of it. I told them we'd meet at the cafe at three tomorrow. How wonderful will it be to see your brother again?”

 _Wonderful,_ thought Emily, but didn't utter the sarcasm out loud. The whole situation reeked of a trap, but looking at her mother's bright hopeful eyes, she knew they had to go. She put in a call to her and Charles' answering service – their old pre-email system to pass messages back and forth, no matter where they were in the world – but also booked a flight down south. They'd have to take a chance at Customs to get into Boston on time, although her fake Canadian passport hadn't let her down yet.

They were early enough in the city for Emily to scout ahead to the location, now a coffee shop instead of the sidewalk cafe of forty years ago. She left Margaret in their nearby hotel room, occupied with the ritual prayers that always soothed her mother's mind. Unfortunately, the spot Margaret picked turned out to be terrible for avoiding capture. It was on one of Boston's notoriously narrow winding streets, with several alleyways around it and poor visibility on multiple vectors. An easily ambushed location. Emily decided that arriving in a moving target was their best bet for quick get-away should the Centre choose to put in an appearance, while still allowing them to scan the corner for Kyle and/or Jarod.

She wished Dad were here. Or even Sister Harriet, to act as lookout. Or anyone on their side, for that matter. The situation felt unmoored, out of control, as if their fragile hidden détente with the Centre was about to be cracked and shattered into chaotic pieces on this fine spring day.

But then again, if Jarod had really gotten out of the Centre, maybe the future had already tipped over.

They pulled up near the location in a taxi, having the driver idle. And to her surprise, there was not Kyle, but instead an even taller man with dark features like a younger version of Dad. The expression on his face was one of wonderment, and amazement, and happiness, and a little bit of terror – all from a soul whose basic goodness shined like a jewel. Deep cracks ran through the brilliance, moral guilt perhaps, but still Jarod was _whole_ , thriving in a way that should not have been possible given all the abuse and harm he must have endured over the years. Emily couldn't help but grin at her brother's improbable survival and sanity.

The moment lasted less than a second before both Jarod and Emily simultaneously noticed the sweeper teams closing in around them.

In the next instant Emily tried to judge whether Jarod could make it to the taxi, and decided he could. She motioned for him to make a run for it, even as she pulled Margaret back into the car. But Jarod apparently made a separate calculation not to risk their capture, even at the lowest probability level. He motioned for them to go, as Margaret crumpled in the vehicle at the renewed loss of her child. The last thing Emily saw from the back of the taxi was Jarod tearfully staring them down, then fight like lightening when the sweeper team approached. She doubted her brother would be easily captured.

They went straight to the airport, for although he mother was already a mess, she'd likely collapse and regress by nightfall. Back over the border, to her safe home and attendants and routine. Emily promised her over and over she would bring Jarod to her side as soon as they located him again.

It would be over two years before she could make good on that promise.

* * * * *

Dad flew straight to Boston to try and track down Kyle and Jarod, but all he found was grief: Kyle was supposedly dead, killed in a car explosion. The only consolation was that Jarod apparently managed to escape, according to camera footage Dad blustered his way into viewing of the area around the cafe. So that turned out to be the most hopeful sign of all: Jarod was alive, sane, free and looking for them too.

They had no way to predict where he would go, however, so they fell back on an old-standby: Watch the Centre as the Centre watched for them, looking for clues of Jarod. Unlike the old days, it turned out neither her brother nor the Centre were interested in being subtle any longer. Jarod's exploits tended to be publicized in the local press, and it soon became apparent that several Centre teams were chasing him down. One of them was led by the daughter of the very same Catherine Parker that had been murdered trying to free her brother. Emily had to scoff at the irony, or perhaps tremble at the power of the Centre to warp people to its will.

A second member of the team was someone named Dr. Sydney Green, whom had published research papers on the development of childhood genius before disappearing from the scientific community. The same Sydney Kyle had mentioned, they decided, likely Jarod's handler for all these years. His substitute father figure, perhaps. They seemed to be operating some kind of carrot-and-stick strategy, maybe hoping to convince Jarod to return to the Centre of his own free will while simultaneously threatening force. That goal that seemed delusional given Jarod's gleeful, repeated baiting of his would-be captors. Obviously he was enjoying his freedom, but also ambivalent about cutting his connections entirely.

A year passed, with a bizarre cat-and-mouse game developing: Jarod would act out in some public manner, followed by the Centre teams, followed more surreptitiously by either Charles or Emily. They left cards with an email address with some of the more likely prospects, ones that Emily's senses deemed trustworthy, but Jarod never seemed to return to the same place twice, no matter how much of a connection he made with people. Her brother was eternally rootless, his identity shifting every time but retaining the same moral core.

Then Jarod fell off the map, and the Centre teams chasing him slowly began to dissolve. Sydney stopped traveling with Miss Parker, whereabouts unknown, and the technician that often accompanied them managed to disappear with his daughter, amidst rumors of corruption and scandal. Parker herself seemed to abdicate the search to another team, as if she were finally done with the whole mess. Perhaps Jarod had finally found some manner of peace, and broken off ties with the Centre. But he still hadn't found them.

And then one day out of the blue, Emily's phone rang.

“Is this Emily Tully?” a deep voice said, in abysmally accented French. This number was her Canadian line.

Alarm bells went off, although the voice sounded kind and a touch nervous. Her ability to get a read off a voice was limited. She hadn't used the last name “Tully” since, well, never. “Who wants to know?” she asked, in regular American English.

“Jarod.”

Emily nearly dropped the phone. Then she shouted across the room, “DAD! Get on the line!”

Through a series of teary – but more secure than Catholic convents – phone calls, they made arrangements to meet Jarod in Nevada. That evidently wasn't where he'd been hiding out for most of the previous year, but considering the events of Boston, a little caution was mutually agreed to be a good thing.

They debated bringing Margaret, and in the end opted not to tell her. Not another heartbreak, unless it panned out for real this time. Jarod could visit her without the rigors of flying her across the continent, and things would go much more smoothly.

The meeting place was an empty airfield on a flat plane in the middle of the desert, with good visibility for a hundred miles. Charles grinned to see his son piloting the other light aircraft. Jarod did look a lot like him, before the gray hair.

Jarod disembarked his plane with two other people, a woman and man both in their thirties with dirty blond hair, both looking a little green around the gills. But then Jarod ran and flung his arms around both Charles and Emily at the same time in a giant bear hug, and everybody began to laugh.

“Dad! I can't believe I finally found you,” Jarod murmured.

“The feeling's mutual, son. We've been chasing you for, what, almost two years now?”

“Three years. Three years since I escaped. You were not easy to find. Even after I finally got the name...”

The woman cleared her throat, and Jarod jumped back with a grin to introduce them. “Dad, Emily, this is Annalise and Tim. They're cousins, and, uh, both were held by the Centre at various times.”

Annalise smiled at her, kindly but also sizing her up, and Emily did the same. After a lifetime of being on the run, habits die hard for everyone, she thought. She got an uncanny vibe off both of them, harder to pin down than anyone she'd met since Kyle. Goodness there, for sure, but also extraordinary strength and power, although in what dimension Emily couldn't say. The man's soul in particular was simultaneously fractured and opened, as if the entire universe was pouring in behind his crystal blue eyes.

“Hi,” said Annalise after a heartbeat pause, and offered her hand to shake. Jarod blinked and something passed between them, a tiny warning followed by trust. They obviously knew each other intimately, and Emily guessed this was the reason Jarod had gone more fully underground in recent months.

Emily took her hand, and experienced the strange sensation of pressure on her own soul. Annalise was _touching_ her somehow, with her mind. Probing softly. “Nice to meet you, Emily,” she said, and pulled back as soon as Emily sensed her presence.

Emily wondered what the woman could do if she pushed. She wondered if the Centre had created Annalise with such a power, or simply found and exploited her in the same they had her brothers. Either way, she knew why they were hiding out somewhere in the wilds of the west.

The man with the blue eyes stepped up then, and with a strange copy of a smile, offered his hand too. “Hi,” he said, with identical inflection as his cousin.

Emily held out her hand, letting him probe her too. But just as their hands met, Annalise broke in with a “Wait!” and lunged for them both.

And Emily fell into Tim's mind.

It felt exactly like that, falling into a vast open chasm as the winds of sensory information of every kind buffeted her plummet. Every brown blade of wearied grass, every bird, the wispy water of the clouds, Jarod's vast rock of a mind, Dad's worry and screams as she collapsed to the ground, dirt and rocks down through the mantle, the harsh metal skin of the planes, every tiny heat-warped leaf on the sagebrush, the _sun_ blasting energy at them _,_ the sun the sun the sun…

And she felt Annalise's mind dive after them, so much stronger than she could have grasped thirty seconds ago. Annalise had merely been whispering before, caressing hello with only a drop of her power, but now she reached in like the hand of God to yank Emily back out before utter madness descended.

 _Let her go, Tim,_ she heard in her mind. _You can't rip an unsuspecting person like that, you could hurt her. We promised Jarod we wouldn't scan them._

 _Angelo now,_ another voice said, the man's voice. _She fell first. Like us._

_No. Tim. Angelo's dead, remember? She's not exactly like us, although she can hear us. More than Jarod though. You're transmitting too much stimulation, you need to let her go even if her mind feels good._

_She can learn to listen to the sun._

Then they both released her, and her mind snapped off as if nothing had happened. She had fallen to her knees, and everyone was hovering around her.

“What the hell happened?” Dad demanded.

“Sorry. He's still learning certain types of self-control,” Annalise said blandly, as if telepathic attacks were an everyday occurrence. “The Centre Swiss-cheesed his mind, although he has access to information the rest of us don't, that's why we brought him along. Probably best not to shake hands, though.”

“What… why… Is that what happens when anyone touches one of you?” Emily asked. Her head was starting to ache just a bit, but mostly she was shaken by the feeling of avoiding a much larger invasion.

“No. You're mind is just an appealing one, for people like us. Very unusual.” She patted Emily on the shoulder, careful not to make skin contact.

“Comforting,” said Tim. “Hear people.”

“Not their _thoughts,”_ Emily protested. “I just get impressions sometimes.”

“Hear souls. Like the sun. One of us. Lucky to be free.”

Annalise nodded in agreement, and shrugged at Jarod's glowering at the less-than-perfect meeting. She touched his hand, skin to skin, and his face softened. She could have been manipulating his mind, Emily thought, but she doubted it. They were talking, without vocal words.

“What the hell just happened?” Dad repeated, and Emily found it was impossible to explain.

* * * * *

Charles and Emily had apparently passed some sort of telepath test, for then they all flew to their hidden home in Southern Oregon. A working farm with distinct anti-technology vibes, and several other relatives that waved at them but kept their distance, obviously giving the visitors some space.

And there Emily discovered he true reason Jarod had switched from bait mode to stealth mode all those months ago, and perhaps even why Parker had de facto given up the search. Jarod had a child, in hiding. Annalise's child, and Emily knew as soon as she laid eyes on her that girl was also a telepath. They were easy to spot, now that she had a taste of their souls. The girl, Miriam, was a lovely thirteen year old with long wavy brown hair and a sharp-witted intelligent air, although she was quiet for most of the initial meeting. She was probably the second smartest person in the room, Emily intuited. The Centre knew what it was doing.

The fact that Miriam was a teenager had Dad scratching his head. “So, you two met only last year?” he asked Annalise, confused.

“Yup.” She collapsed on a comfortable worn couch next to her daughter and put her arms around her.

“But Miriam is thirteen?”

“Mind-blowing, I know,” Annalise replied. “Breeding project. God, it's weird to say that out loud. They decided to cross certain families, I guess, and I inconveniently escaped while pregnant. We've got some genetic data, but not enough to make the situation clear.”

“And...you're all telepaths?”

“Well, not your son, although he tries,” and everyone laughed. “But the rest of us, yes. By touch primarily, I can't tell what you're thinking from this far. Except what's written all over your face.” The group chuckled again. Camaraderie, thought Emily. Another whole family that had been targeted by the Centre. It was hard to believe the Tullys weren't alone.

“Dad,” Jarod ventured. “Where's Mom? When can I see her?” Emily and Charles were the ones to exchange a private glance this time, and Jarod read into it the worst. “Is she…?”

“No, no, son, she's still alive,” Charles soothed. “We're just not exactly together.”

Jarod frowned, his face falling as some deep-rooted dream crumbled before him. “Divorced?” he asked softly.

“No. My faith tells me you can only marry one person, and that person will be Margaret, forever and always. But your mother had … difficulties ... after Emily was born. You met Harriet Tashman?”

“Yes. I saw the farm where you lived. Where you were born,” he said, looking at Emily. “It looked beautiful.”

“It was a prison,” said Charles starkly. “Margaret couldn't cope, not with another child to hide, not with being on the run, not with the world in general. We hid away, but it only aggravated her persecution complex. Eventually it gave way to full psychosis. She's still only partially functioning, under controlled circumstances.”

“Where is she?” Jarod whispered, his eyes filling with tears.

“At a Catholic facility outside of Montréal. Not far from where I raised Emily. She would love to see you, Jarod, but you need to be prepared.”

Jarod nodded, and looked like he was about to dash to the nearest plane to hop across the continent. Just then though, Annalise tipped her head. “You're machine's going off, Jarod.” And like she was a prophet, a laptop wired up in a discreet corner beeped urgently.

“Broots,” said Tim, and Emily wondered if this family had some mystically power to read machines as well as minds. And what the hell was a 'Broots'? _The technician who embezzled from the Centre and ran away with his kid,_ her brain supplied. His malfeasance may not have been self-imposed, she realized with amusement. That's one way to disrupt the team chasing down you and your family.

Jarod's shoulders tensed at the interruption, but apparently the alert was important, for he got up to check the message. Then his frown deepened.

“Broots has a lead on Donoterase,” he said. “The Centre has a hidden tissue storage lab called 'Pakor'. He thinks they're storing genetic samples from Donoterase there.”

“We know of Pakor,” Emily said. “Baltimore, right? Remember, Dad, we deemed it low priority? Although they did go to some effort to hid the facility behind some frozen food front. Never heard of Donoterase, though.”

“It was the lab where I was kept prisoner,” Annalise said softly. “We have reason to believe more children might have been created. It would be the perfect place to hide them.”

“Why not at Blue Cove?” asked Charles. “I knew you were there for twenty years, Jarod, and we couldn't do a damn thing. Surely they could be hiding more projects somewhere in the sublevels.”

“Not from me,” said Jarod. “I've hacked the mainframe several times and now so has Broots. There's plenty of questionable projects going on in the sublevels, but none involving children living there. The Centre has to be more covert than that to get something like this by me.”

“Pakor's a relatively low-security facility,” said Emily. “They can't keep too many people there or it would draw attention to the fact that not is all what it seems.”

“Exactly,” said Jarod, his eyes lighting up. Emily could already tell that look meant trouble, and by Annalise's narrowing eyes, this was a look he got often. “Security's probably passive electronic monitoring, like their data annexes. Not a challenge.”

Emily turned to grin at him. “Well, we could _make_ it a challenge. I for one wouldn't mind hitting back at the Centre, after all these years of hiding away. Then we could puddle-jump up to Canada to see Mom, while you send the data to this Broots guy.”

“You're just as much of a trouble-maker as he is, I can tell,” Annalise complained. “Don't get caught, Jarod, I'll never forgive you.”

“Would you come with us, Annalise?” Emily asked. She was admittedly curious what the woman could really do.

“I'd rather have both my arms broken than directly engage the Centre,” she replied. “But you crazy kids have fun.”

“A Tully mission,” Dad said, grinning. The name was odd to hear, like a long-lost family heirloom shined up once more.

They agree to leave in the morning, for yet more days of flying. But this time Emily felt not like she was walking into a trap, but freer than she'd been in years. Less like prey, more like an army. For once they were the ones to go the offensive. She could tell, now, why Jarod had enjoyed taunting the Centre so much after his release. Catharsis.

* * * * *

That evening Emily sat in the cozy living room, late after dark. Jarod and Dad were in the kitchen discussing battle plans, but Emily already had the gist and was ready for a break. If she knew Dad, he'd eventually steer the conversation to the topics he most wanted to know. Jarod's childhood. His motivation for escape. Kyle, whom they knew hadn't been killed in the car explosion after all, but in some sort of confrontation with the Centre.

Miriam and Tim were sitting on the rug in the living room when she walked in, playing a board game with black and white round stones. Go, the Chinese strategy game. Emily could tell Tim was crushing her at it, but the girl didn't seem perturbed. The odd thing was, they were holding hands.

“Can't you tell what the other is thinking when you touch like that?” Emily asked.

“You can control most of the information flow,” the girl responded, shrugging. “But with him, a lot leaks. That's part of the challenge.”

“How often do you beat him?”

“Wellll, never yet, but I've been close a few times. I'm a very motivated girl.”

Emily chuckled at that. “Do you enjoy having your family back? Your Dad?”

“There's not really a 'back', I never met him until last year, and he didn't grow up with a Dad either, exactly. But now I can't imagine him not being around. Are you glad to have your brother back?”

“Definitely. I've heard about him my entire life.”

“Did you have to hide your whole life, too, like me?”

Emily sighed and sat down next Tim, across from her. “Yeah. Sort of. You still have to live your life to whatever you degree you can, otherwise they've won and captured you just as much as if they've taken you to Blue Cove. Jarod seems to have embraced that philosophy.”

“Yeah. He'll try anything once. Mom calls him a daredevil. Can I ask you a question?”

“Ask away.”

“Do you think you're a pretender, like them? Can you become other people?”

“I don't know about the 'becoming' part, but it is easy to convince people that you are someone else. I faked my way into a prison when I was twenty-one. I've told people I'm a detective, reporter, university student doing a paper, and no one ever questioned it. But I've never known what exactly the Centre means by “Pretender,” so there's that. Maybe Jarod can tell me, one day.”

“I think you are one,” Miriam said, and she bent back over the board. The two of them made some quick exchanges, which resulted in Tim taking a large territory of her pieces. She grimaced while Tim grinned.

“Do you two talk to each while you play the game? Is that why you're holding hands?” Emily asked.

“Not so much talking. The language centers of his brain were damaged, and we weren't able to heal it entirely. But we … share. Do you want to hear?” Miriam held out her hand, palm up, for Emily to take if she wished.

“Uhhh...”

“Don't worry, he promises not to pull you in. I can help too.”

Unable to restrain her curiosity, Emily rested her hand on her niece's. Nothing immediately happened except a faint tickle of Miriam's probe, but the girl tipped her head at the contact.

“Your mind is unusual.”

“So I've heard,” Emily said gruffly. “What does that even mean?”

“It feels nice to have contact with you. Like your brain is a balm or something. I don't have to concentrate hardly at all to make this connection, and that usually only happens with people I've had a lot of practice with.”

“Jarod?”

“He's pretty good at reading us now. Mom trained him a bit to project. But you're not even projecting. Like your mind is a pillow and I want to sink into it. Wanna see Tim's mind? Pretty cool.”

“O...kay.”

This time, Miriam eased her in. At first the room simply seemed heightened, sharper somehow. But the Emily gradually realized she could feel all the objects in the room as if they were breathing animals. Plus all the people in the house, the wild trees in the forest outside, satisfied domestic crops planted, quiet real animals settling in for sleep beyond. Everything tied together in a wondrous web of interconnection, complex layers swimming around each other, shifting with each breath.

 _Isn't his mind beautiful?_ Miriam thought at her.

 _Yeah._ She responded mentally, without even thinking about how she did it. Somewhere in the background, she could tell Tim was pleased by their observation.

 _Hey, Tim,_ Emily continued, _can you show me the Centre?_ He was the only telepath who'd been inside there during the same era as her brothers, and could directly report back what it was like. Beside her, through the hand Miriam's disapproval rained down, but she didn't cut the connection. No emotion at all came from Tim.

He reached over and took Emily's other hand, so for a second all three of them were connected in a ring. Emily didn't plummet this time; he seemed to be keeping his distance just a bit, so it was more like flying aloft through his mind instead of falling. Then he let go of Miriam.

 _Angelo's not for her,_ he said. _Jarod doesn't want her to see._

_He probably doesn't want me to see either, but what the hell._

Tim gave her a conspiratorial smile, and suddenly she was _there._ Although it was hard to tell where exactly “there” was, it was so dark and grimy. In front of them there was flickering lights, striped, and a tremendous pounding slammed her head.

 _whats that noise is it even a noise_ her thoughts rushed out, jumbled, and Tim pulled back on the pounding so it merely thumped in the background.

_Electricity. Everywhere._

_Wow that sucks. I see why you live on a farm._

_Different noises here._

He focused in on the room in front of them, behind the light stripes for some reason. She saw a very young Jarod, probably in his late teens, sitting in a mock house. The memory was stifling, enclosed, claustrophobic. Jarod was speaking, the rhythm of his voice indicating a narration of some kind, but the meaning of the words did not come through. What was clear, however, was that Jarod was upset, the emotional tenor of his voice getting more and more agitated. Another man, older with balding hair, circled the room, at turns comforting and cajoling, his voice slowly rising in intensity like he was wearing down Jarod's soul.

_What's happening? Why is he so distressed?_

_Doesn't want to do the sim. Sydney must push._

_Sydney. Right. What's the sim about?_

_Don't remember. Blur together, so many._

_Yeah. Okay, that's enough, Tim. Thank you for showing me._

_Lucky to be free._

_Me? Yeah I guess they would have stuck me in that room, right?_

_Yes. One of us._

_Miriam too?_

_Yes._

* * * * *

They flew to Baltimore the next day, just the three of them in Dad's plane. Jarod was insatiable with the questions, about Mom and Dad's family, about Emily's upbringing and adventures as an adult, about their quest for him. Jarod got them to talk so much, Emily only noticed much later that they didn't get a chance to ask about him.

The building they were planning to hit looked like an ordinary industrial building on the outside. _Pakor Frozen Foods_ was the front, and apparently there was indeed some sort of food operation towards the loading dock in the back. Based on satellite imagery, Jarod guessed the hidden lab was off to one side, on a windowless end of the building with a large liquid nitrogen tank. Jarod thought the tank was connected to a backup system for storage freezers, which only would be necessary for critical biological samples.

At a side entrance, Jarod infected the security system with some kind of virus, and suddenly his blank key card worked and clicked open the door. An alarm sounded in the food portion of the building, drawing whatever physical security was on-site down away from the true target in the building. Jarod estimated they had only about ten minutes – and better to do it in eight – before they were noticed.

The rooms were unmarked except for strenuous “No Admittance” signs and more frequent locks. Some lab work appeared to be in progress, but from what little Emily knew of it, there was nothing that high level. Instead the facility seemed to consist of room after room of -80 degree deep freezers, interspersed with refrigerated rooms filled with jars of tissues floating in clear liquid and reeking of formaldehyde.

“Take every disk, notebook or paper inventory you see,” Jarod murmured. “Especially anything marked 'Gemini'. I'll work on the computer.”

In the office, Jarod hooked up a hard drive to the ordinary desktop computer, copying all of its encrypted local data. They could crack the actual contents later. Emily crowbarred open a locked cabinet and hit the jackpot: boxes and boxes of small shiny CD-esque disks, each with tiny code labels: _Echidna 1968-1970,_ _Leda 1979-1984, Chimera 1977, Gemini 1971-1972,_ _Talos 1982, Cerebus 1982-1990, Gemini 1983, Gemini 1984, Euryale 19_ _84-19_ _85, Gemini 1985-1988, Cerebus 1991-, Gemini_ _1989-1995, Gemini 1996-_

“Jarod. I found Gemini. And wow, someone likes Greek mythology.”

He left his hacking to glance through the contents of the closet. It was a lot of disks. “They do have a flair for the dramatic,” Jarod muttered. “Take all of the Gemini and Euryale disks, and a sampling from every other box. Especially the older stuff.”

“Euryale?”

“Based on the dates, might be Annalise. Is there anything older than 1968?”

“Uh, yeah, like five whole boxes of miscellaneous. Going back to the forties, _Jesus_. Too many code names for the outside of the boxes.”

“They had less data then. Modern genetic information takes up a lot of room. Take as much as you can.”

Major Charles came back in from his check of the freezer rooms, and helped them load up a few duffel bags. Then they made a run for it, just as the guards began to shout from down the hallway. Thirty thrilling seconds of running, and they were out and in the car.

“That was _fun_ ,” Emily remarked, breathing hard. They were all grinning like Cheshire cats at the exhilarating escape. “Can we do it again?”

“You're a natural,” Jarod said, laughing. “Although normally the recapture quotient is higher, puts a little more fear into it.”

“Yeah, okay, maybe not. What do you think we got?”

“A mountain of genetic, proteomic and other bioinformatic data to sift through, but I'm not going to worry about that now. Highest priority right now is to find an inventory, where the samples are coming from. Somebody must have written down where that damned facility is.”

“They'll know we stole the disks, Jarod,” Charles put in. “How will the Centre react?”

“Hard to say without knowing for sure what this Gemini project is, and what their doing with it. I'll put Broots on monitoring Miss Parker and Brigitte, though.”

“What do you think it is?”

Jarod grimaced. “Sydney told me there was a boy, before he went dark. And I have a theory on who that boy is. Because 'Gemini' means twins.”

 

* * * * *

They worked through the night and into the next day, caffeine-fueled. Jarod found the inventory database, but although Donoterase was referenced, there still was no clue to its whereabouts. It was obviously one of the Centre's deepest secrets, one unknown even to the scientists working on the data.

The genetics data, what little they could parse in a short period of time, did confirm the nature of Gemini. And it shook their father to his core.

“A _clone?”_ Major Charles asked, aghast. “Some kind of look-alike monster in a lab somewhere? Maybe we should let it be.”

“He's a _child,_ Dad. Like a twin, only younger. We can't let them abuse and exploit him any longer. He was Raines' project before Sydney, that's never a good sign. Just ask Tim.”

“How do you know this thing even has a soul?”

Jarod stared him down coolly. “I don't think God cares whether you are conceived in a petri dish or not. He's a human being, and part of our family. Just like Miriam, only unlucky enough to be raised by _them._ We have to help him. I wish I could get ahold of Sydney.”

 _Just like Miriam,_ thought Emily. His son in a way, raised in captivity just like him. No wonder Jarod was desperate to rescue the boy. Didn't Dad see that all his years of obsession was exactly the same?

A few hours later, when Jarod was still going strong with a laser-like focus and Emily and Charles were about to collapse, Broots came through again.

“J..J..Jarod,” a jittery voice said over the phone. “We got a message. Title header's 'Refuge.' You've got to take a look at it.”

_052699 0615 845367_

“It's Sydney,” Jarod said gleefully.

“Date and time?” Charles said, rubbing his eyes. “What are the coordinates?”

“The Centre's larger airstrip, the one they use for international flights. They're moving the boy tomorrow morning.” Jarod turned and clasped his exhausted father on the shoulder. “I'm going after him, Dad. Will you help me? He's _family.”_

Charles gave him a huge bear-hug back. “Of course I will, son. If it's that important to you, I will.”

 

* * * * *

They had to fly immediately to Delaware to have any hope of rescuing Gemini on time. Jarod had a plan already, one detailed enough that Emily suspected he had foreseen such a scenario before. She had never been so close to the jaws of the devil, located just a couple of miles away on the shore, and it was surprising how nervous that made her. Unlike the robbery at Pakor, this plan was dangerous. There were too many unknowns: How many cars, how much security per car, monitoring of the road in advance of the caravan, whether the boy would even cooperate or not. Emily could tell Dad was nervous too. It had to remind him of his one breech into the enormous building, at Catherine Parker's request. Look how well that had gone.

They were exhausted, too, running on adrenaline now. Jarod seemed like a man possessed, or as if he were a machine that needed no sleep. Emily had seen him take exactly one catnap thus far on this trip. Come to think of it, he hadn't sleep much at Annalise's farm, either.

They stole three construction trucks and placed them strategically at a bottleneck in the road, just between two hills and down only two hundred feet from a small side road that could be used as an alternate getaway route. Jarod had acquired – from stockpiles he had conveniently hidden near Blue Cove – multiple smoke bombs and tear-gas canisters to throw into cars, plus four gas masks for them and the boy. The plan was to hit them fast and make a quick exit in the low-visibility confusion. He also showed them hurriedly on a map where more hidden vehicles were, in case they needed to switch, and another airstrip with a parked plane he owned. It was quite obvious that Jarod had done battle with the Centre before, and would probably do it again. He didn't even carry a gun.

The caravan came along a little early, but they were still prepared. Jarod stopped the line of cars with a fake construction sign, and the three of them hit the first three cars without incident. As Jarod predicted, an adolescent boy was in the third vehicle down the line, accompanied by a silver-haired man that didn't blink as he was gassed and Charles pulled the boy from the car. Gemini seemed dazed by the light, his eyes glazed over black, and he submitted to their direction. He was an exact younger replica of the teenager in Tim's mind. Fourteen years old, they estimated, based on the disks.

The plan looked like a swift success in its first few seconds, but then a fifth car pulled up unannounced. Emily recognized the woman from the two years of cat-and-mouse tracking they had done: Miss Parker, daughter of Catherine Parker, daughter of the director, Jarod's tormentor. _I thought that bitch gave up the chase,_ thought Emily as she ran for a truck, but it was already too late. Parker seemed to waiver her attention between Jarod and her father, for reasons she didn't understand, but before Jarod could get into a vehicle, she raised her gun.

From the expression on Jarod's face, he didn't expect Parker to actually pull the trigger. He was almost taunting her with his eyes, which seemed like a bad choice to Emily, but what did she know of their relationship? She sprinted for the truck with Dad just as the incomprehensible _BOOM_ rolled across the little valley, and Jarod crumpled to the ground behind a car. Charles shoved the boy into the truck, shouting in desperation, but Emily came up behind him and practically dislocated her father's shoulder to prevent him from running.

In the cab of the truck, the boy fainted.

“Dad! Jarod's down! We've got to go!” The sweepers were converging on Jarod's position, making immediate rescue even more unlikely. Emily couldn't tell how bad the wound was, but obviously Jarod couldn't stand. “They've got him! Go, now!”

She climbed over the boy's limp form to the driver's seat and began to gun it, even as her dad leaped into the open door. Behind them they could a pile of security holding Jarod down, who even while injured was wriggling and trying to get away. The long-lost child, lost again. Emily couldn't believe it. Even in only the few days since they had met, Jarod seemed invincible.

Major Charles looked back at the smoke over the hill, and then down at the copy of his son laying passed out in the seat, this unnatural child they had risked everything to get, and began to weep.

Emily was twenty-nine years old, and they were right back to the beginning.

 


	2. Colors of the Rainbow

When James awoke, mercifully he was located in a dim cabin, with only some sunlight streaming in through old cloth to light the room. Even that seemed unnaturally bright, and for a second he was distracted by the sight of dust floating in the rainbow beam. At Donoterase everything but the arboretum was kept meticulously clean and sterile, even animal cages and plant testing rooms, so that the gray cement walls were a neutral color for him, and particulates certainly never floated in the air lest someone's samples get contaminated. The smell here almost overwhelmed the strange colors, all of it adding up to musty oldness, decay in the cabin and life beyond. Maybe a forest?

“Hey, Dad, the kid's awake.” A female voice, and James knew before he glanced up it was the perceptive young woman whose colors flashed orange, with some sort of shiny silver filigree running through. That was unique, the silver.

“Oh, thank God. I was beginning to think he hit his head or something.” Her father, mostly gray but also waves of blue. The colors reminded James of the sky, or photographs he had seen of it. “Do you, um, remember what happened? What's your name?”

James cleared his voice, and found he could speak. “James. They call me James.” Gemini was his project name, but that was supposed to be a secret. “You took me from the Centre. And the don... I mean Jarod. He was shot in the leg. I was supposed to go to Africa.” Dr. Sydney had told him Jarod's name, at long last. Funny, the name didn't help to know his twin nearly as much as that glimpse of his rainbow of colors. And now they held him captive and James was somehow free. It was as if only one of them could be in the world at any given time, while the other was locked away.

“Do you know _why_ we took you from the Centre?” the woman asked, gently. She sat down next to him on the old sofa, not touching.

How much did they know? How much should he reveal? What if the Centre found him and took him back again? Surely Mr. Raines would punish him for revealing sensitive project information. Probably he shouldn't have even given his informal name. “I'm … related to you,” he finally ventured, probing for what they knew. “What are your names?”

The woman stared at him for a couple of seconds, then turned to the older man. “He knows. Wow. Did Sydney Green tell you or did you figure it out on your own? I'm kind of impressed. Well, I'm Emily, and this is Charles Tully, my dad. And, uh, Jarod's dad. Do you know who Jarod is?”

They knew of Dr. Sydney. They knew Jarod, obviously. They knew of _him,_ when nobody outside of Donoterase was supposed to. James decided to give up some accurate information, as a gesture of goodwill. He would need these people to figure out the outside world.

“My genetic donor,” James said, and it was strange to articulate the fact out loud. The other two seemed almost as stunned as he. “And a Pretender,” he added as an afterthought. That part he rarely dwelled on, unless he was forced to.

“You say that like its an ordinary thing, son,” said the man, shaking his head. “Everyday event, to meet a real live clone of your long-lost boy.”

“Dad, leave him be. He was raised in isolation, you can't expect him to know anything about the regular world.” Emily's colors shifted to reddish black, her words hiding some old anger and pain. But then she seemed to gain control over her emotions, and gave him a smile and a small pat of shoulder. James jumped at the contact; no one _ever_ touched him outside the rare sim. Or during punishment of course, although he hadn't messed up that badly in well over a year.

Mr. Tully took a step back and threw up his hands in exasperation at his daughter. “All right, all right. We need to plan our next move. Jarod's been recaptured, but he's also injured. Maybe they've taken him to a nearby hospital for surgery. If we hit them fast, maybe we can get him back before they transport him back to Blue Cove.”

“Seriously, Dad? Are you delusional? They're not taking him to any hospital. He's back in the pits of that building, even if they have to hack off his leg with a chainsaw. They'll never leave him vulnerable again. Besides it's only the two of us, and we've got to get Boy Genius Version Two to safety somewhere as well. Just not possible right now. We've got to follow Jarod's instructions and regroup at the Wallaces.”

James privately agreed with her conclusions, but watched the exchange in silent fascination. Emily was _arguing_ with her father. Weren't children supposed to defer to their elders? It was like seeing a novel come to life.

“We can't just leave him,” hissed her father. “Not again. Not when we just got him back.”

“We don't have a choice. You'll only get yourself killed if you march in there. How is this situation any different than a year ago, when we thought Jarod was still a brainwashed prisoner? Except now you've got _grandchildren_ to protect.” She jerked her head towards James, and he realized she meant him. Mr. Tully was supposed to automatically love him just because they were related, even though they just met. How could they act like a family when they were complete strangers to each other? How was he, James, _supposed_ to act? There were no instructions, and this was not a sim.

“The plane, Dad. We've got to get him out of here. Off the entire damn eastern seaboard. Even with Jarod back, they're not going to let their precious science experiment walk away. You know they think of him as their property, just like the rest of us.”

 _Who's the rest of us?_ James thought. But he wasn't comfortable enough to ask out loud. Too many questions, too much stimulation, his mind was starting to loop now. He needed to calm down, observe, control his thoughts.

Mr. Tully seemed resigned to defeat. “Fine. Oregon it is. We should be able to get there by tomorrow morning, with a bit of a layover. You want to fill in as pilot for me, girl?”

Emily grinned at him, all trace of antagonistic colors gone. “Maybe. If you actually let me fly this time instead of clucking like a mother hen.”

“Hard bargain, but I'll try.”

They were packing up their few possessions when James spoke up again. “Mr. Tully? I'm sorry your son was taken. That he was hurt trying to help me. I would change places with him if I could, let him go free.”

The man gave him a long look, his colors reflecting a strange combination of regret and longing and old grief. “You know what? If he were here, he would say the same thing about you. He would walk right back into the Centre, to guarantee his children were free to live their lives.” He rested his hand on James' shoulder, just like Emily had moments before, and this time James forced himself not to flinch away. “Em's right, we owe it to him to get you to safety. And fortunately for you, there exists the perfect place, with someone there you'll want to meet.”

“Who?” James asked.

“Jarod's other child. And she's right about your age too.”

James found it hard to imagine the thought. A girl, his sister, raised in freedom? His polar opposite, in every way. What could she be like?

* * * *

The flight was claustrophobic, but James didn't mind it. He was used to small spaces and blank walls, and although the blurry colors of the land below frightened him, it wasn't terribly different from a sim. Major Charles – as his grandfather insisted he call him – even granted him some flying lessons on the plane. He recognized all the instrumentation from past sims, and even the motions of the craft gliding through the air were familiar. But the mountains were gray blobs through the view window, and the patterned ground below swirled in front of eyes, and he couldn't judge distance through the fluffy clouds in any coherent manner. Major Charles was subtly disappointed, but James tried to push it aside. Clearly Jarod was an excellent pilot, but James wasn't Jarod. They would learn, eventually. He could only be himself.

He did try to probe them for information, though, as the flight wore on. There was so much in the situation that he didn't understand, the Centre, to the donor and his – estranged, perhaps? – family, to this other family that they were traveling across an entire continent to meet. How did the puzzle all fit together? James finally just asked Emily, and to his surprise she plopped down in the chair next to him with a notebook and began to draw a pedigree.

“Here's what we know so far. There are at least three family lineages they found with clusters of people with unusual mental abilities. Jarod says they had other individual children assigned to the Pretender project, but those were isolated cases, not family clusters.” She drew three circles on the paper around some small circles and squares. “The Jamieson-Parkers, the Tullys, and the Wallaces. The Parkers control the Centre, and have ensured that none of their children have been included in any of the exploitative training of children. They seem to train them to run the Centre instead.”

James nodded. The beautiful lady and her mother, they were part of this group. Her strength and natural authority flowed from her colors. He thought he remembered that the father was present at his last sim, but he wasn't as distinctive. Hard to believe that was only yesterday.

“So the next group is the Tullys, that's us, including you pipsqueak. Jarod was their star pupil. They took my other brother as well, but he's gone now.”

“I'm sorry,” James said reflexively. He thought that's what you should say, out of respect for a loved one that died. “But what about you? Were you raised by the Centre.”

“No. My parents hid me after I was born. Locked away, just like you.” Her father threw her a disappointed look over his shoulder from the cockpit. Clearly this was an old sensitive issue between the two of them. “That's, uh, why we didn't know Jarod very well. Or don't know him. They took him and Kyle when they were very young. We only just met him again a week ago.”

“I'm sorry,” James said again. “What about this group, the Wallaces?”

“They're … a little different. Powerful. I don't think The Centre knew quite how powerful. They managed to damage the one child they took and thought it was a freak accident, so the others weren't interrogated until later.”

“But there are others?”

“Yeah. Seems like a big family. Both of the Wallaces that were stolen managed to escape, eventually.”

“And the girl? My donor's daughter?”

Emily drew a connecting line between the Wallace circle and Tully one. “Apparently they wanted to play matchmaker, see what would come out of it. But Annalise escaped while she was pregnant, and the family's hidden all the most powerful ones.”

“So she grew up isolated, like us?”

“No, hon. Nothing like us. There's a world of difference between living with your extended family on a farm and being raised in a lab. Or in a barn with your unstable mother for seven years.”

James was silent for a few seconds, then ventured the question really on his mind. “If you only met Jarod a week ago, why did you come after me? Surely he could have predicted how risky it would be. With… with a sim.” Jarod was good at the sims, he had to remind himself. Unlike him. It was deeply disappointing that he couldn't talk to the donor about it, ask what mental trick Jarod used to perform all those simulations that had ruled James' life for fourteen years. James could fake a sim with the best of them, but despite months of coaching from Dr. Sydney he still didn't really _know_ what they were really about.

“Jarod insisted on getting you, kid. It galled him more than anything that the Centre would keep any kid in captivity, let alone _his_ kid. I think he'd been trying to find you for some time. Still don't know where this mysterious 'Donoterase' is. Any thoughts on that?”

“It's underground. Not far from the Centre. They don't let anyone but Dr. Hanson and Mr. Raines leave during the week, not even Dr. Sydney. That's all I know.”

Emily looked him straight in the eye. “Any other human lab rats being raised down there?”

“No. Just animals.”

“You sure about that? There's no extra-extra secret wing hidden on a level where you weren't allowed?”

“Donoterase's not that big. I know everyone there. I am – I was – the only human project.”

The woman slumped back in relief, her flaming orange colors toning down in intensity. “Well. I guess Jarod did it, then. All the captives we know of are free.”

“Except him. Are you going to free him?”

“Tough nut to crack, the Centre's proven again and again they'd let the everything else burn to keep their claws in Jarod. But we have no choice but to try.”

* * * * *

After a hard day and night in the plane, with only brief stops for fuel and food, they landed the light aircraft at a tiny airport nestled in a valley among some green hills. Again the sun seemed too bright for his eyes, even though it was only morning, and James had a hard time telling where he was on the short car ride to the mysterious farm. The driver that picked them up, a middle-aged man about the same age as Major Charles, was quiet and obviously worried about Jarod, although he only said that “everyone” wanted to hear the full story. The most interesting thing about the man was his colors, a muted green that matched his taciturn personality. Behind that, however, was an eye-straining metallic shimmer, like Emily's silver but amplified at least a hundred times. A mental power of some extraordinary kind. James wondered what they could really do.

From what James could see, the farm was picturesque and iconic: A white multistory house with a porch, orchard with many roaming objects that he guessed were chickens, neatly lined rows of some kind of crop behind the house, a large patch of yellow blurred drying grass, all surrounded by green and orange hills that James presumed were forest. The road was rough and jittery leading up to the house, covered in little rocks. He picked one up on the way out of the car, feeling its rough gray grittiness in his palm, and the slight warmth emanating from the side exposed to the sun. His first rock. He slipped it into his pocket.

A woman came marching out of the house, and glancing at her James almost stumbled backwards to the car. Her real appearance was ordinary – pale face, wavy light hair, blue eyes – but smothering that, overwhelming any other impression of her, the silver flashes were _blinding,_ as if her mind were a deadly honed sword that could strike them down at any time. And she was _angry._

“What the hell happened?!” she practically shouted at Major Charles. “How could Jarod get captured? He's gotten away a hundred times before!”

“Miss Parker shot him point blank in the leg, Annalise,” Charles told her with regret. “There was nothing we could do without getting captured ourselves, and losing the boy as well. Do you think that's what Jarod would have wanted?”

The stunning silver sword withdrew as the woman calmed herself. As the distracting colors diminished, James could focus more on her true appearance. She seemed familiar somehow, although of course it was impossible that they had ever met in person-- he would surely remember the sword. He searched his memory, and suddenly the photographic image popped into place.

“I know you,” he murmured. James didn't think he'd said it loud enough for her to hear, but something drew her attention anyway.

The woman – Annalise, Major Charles had said – stepped towards him. She seemed to know he had some sense about her, for she withdrew the sword completely, with effortless control. “How do you know me, young man?” she asked calmly. “I only know Jarod, not you.”

Maybe she was thinking he and his donor had some kind of mystical connection? That wasn't the source of knowledge at all. So far honesty seemed to be highly valued among all the Centre escapees, so he decided to share what he knew. “You're the telepath. The Centre was trying to find you and your daughter. Last year Mr. Raines made me do a simulation to predict where you would live. They said they wanted to find you for your own protection.”

They had given him a complete dossier on her abilities, which included the ability to project words and images, forcibly extract information from people's minds, and render victims unconscious at a second's touch. A mighty sword indeed. Her weakness was electrical fields, and indeed James noted that their location was very rustic and isolated from advanced technology. At the time James didn't believe the sim was real, although of course he had to try and Pretend it was. Telepathy, more than a bit farfetched as far as modern neuroscience was concerned. There had been very few details in the file on the child, and nothing indicating she was in any way related to him.

James' words must have mollified her, for she only snorted. “Of course they did. Lucky for us, that one didn't work. Come in the house, hon, you must be exhausted and overwhelmed.”

“Is the girl here?” he blurted out, then internally cringed. _The girl_ sounded so impersonal, but no one had told him what her name was. Annalise only grinned at him through his awkwardness, though.

“The girl's name is Miriam, and she's coming back down to the house as we speak. What's _your_ name, kid? They call you something other than Gemini, I hope.”

“James. What's wrong with Gemi...” His question trailed off as two silver balls flitted into his peripheral vision. One came through the front door of the house onto the porch, the other was moving fast from the orchard towards them. Running. She skidded to a halt just a few feet in front of him, staring. He stared back.

Like with Annalise, he was first distracted by her colors, which were beautiful: A chaotic eddy of mostly reds and browns, with filigrees of silver flitting in and out. Her abilities were less honed and more diffuse than her mother's, he decided. Then James shifted to examine her real appearance, and even that was shocking. It was like gazing at a slightly lighter, longer-haired version of himself. Miriam's eyes and hair weren't nearly as dark as his, but the shape of their faces was nearly identical. They were even the same height.

“Oh, wow,” murmured Emily, behind him. “If there was ever any doubt she's Jarod's kid, because... _wow._ ”

The girl recovered faster than James did. “Hi, I'm Miriam,” she said, and stuck out her hand. The shining threads extended towards him with the touch, probing, but unlike with Annalise's lethal sword, he wasn't afraid. As they touched each other's hands, somewhere in his mind he felt the gentlest brush, a warm sense that he was no longer alone.

_What's your name? I know you can hear me. Hope this isn't too freaky._

The words popped into his mind, a strange intrusion but not unpleasant. Then he realized she might be able to sense everything he thought while they were touching.

_It's okay, I won't push in. But if you think hard in words I can hear them back._

_James,_ he directed at her. Then: _I wish she would talk to me more._ Which he didn't mean to project, but she heard it anyway. Even without the smile on her face, he felt her amusement, which was like pure joy flowing into his veins.

_Don't worry, it gets easier for readers with practice. So I'm told. I'll try not to pry. You're already better than most people at this, just like Jarod was._

_You call him Jarod, not Dad?_

_Eh, it's a little weird all around. I'll tell you later, my mom's about to blow her top again because I wasn't supposed to bother you._

Indeed Annalise was eying them with suspicion, and cleared her throat, while Miriam dropped his hand. “James, honey, maybe you want to take a break and rest a bit? Eat something? I know this is all a lot to take in.”

“I'm not hungry right now. But thank you,” he said stiffly. All James really wanted was to do was talk to Miriam some more, but he couldn't exactly say that out loud.

“All right,” said Annalise. “I need to talk to your grandfather and aunt here for a few moments, so why doesn't Miriam show you around and give you a tour? Enjoy the outside. Don't stay in the hot sun too long, you're not used to it.”

Charles nodded his head in agreement, but still with a confused look in his eye. “Is that what we're going with? Jarod's … child?” He seemed uncomfortable again, and James realized somatic-cell nuclear transfer must not be common. Society didn't have established family customs around cloning yet.

“Jarod's twenty-five years older, I think that makes the most sense. Plus the kids share fifty percent of their genetic material and are obviously related, as anyone with eyes can see. People will assume they are siblings anyway.” Annalise squinted and waggled a finger at them. “Got it, you two? Brother and sister. Now go hang out in the treehouse like normal kids while the grown-ups talk battle plans.”

Miriam didn't wait for his reply. She grabbed his hand and dragged him away, before James had a chance to mention that maybe he could be helpful for their strategizing to rescue his injured donor. But they wanted to treat him as an ordinary young person.

Now all he had to do was figure out what that meant.

* * * * *

Miriam held his hand as they walked past the lines of trees with chickens milling all about. _Would you prefer we talk out loud, or is mindtalking okay?_

_I've never talked to anyone like this. I've never had a private conversation, I think, ever._

_You were always recorded, right? Jarod has copies of him_ _self_ _doing all of his sims._ _Which is_ _both strange and endearing_ _, but that's Jarod for you._ _He looked exactly like you when he was a kid. Isn't it a little bit weird to know exactly what you'll look like when you grow up?_

_It's like identical twins, there are always some differences. Sicker than him, my knee…_

He didn't intend for her to hear the last part, which was an idle thought, but she did anyway. _Sicker, why? What's wrong with your knee?_

 _Nothing,_ he sent back quickly, but Miriam wasn't fooled.

_Hate to say it, dude, but it's impossible to lie to us. I mean, even when talking out loud we can tell, let alone when mindtalking. So spill it, what's the big secret? I won't tell anyone if you don't want me to, I promise._

James hesitated before replying. Would she really keep the secret? Could there even _be_ any secrets when he was touching her like that? With a deep breath, he decided to take a leap of faith.

_There's likely arthritis in my right knee. It hurts to even walk up this slope. That's not normal for a teenager._

_Okay, so? Wouldn't the Centre want to take care of you, if you are so important to them? Why are you so afraid?_

James abruptly dropped her hand. It was too much all at once, the forced intimacy and shared emotions and someone _seeing_ what he buried inside himself. He took a deep breath to calm himself and finish the conversation, for it would be rude to cut off now. James did want to be her friend, but he needed more than fifteen minutes to adjust.

But to his surprise, she was the one who apologized. “Hey, I'm sorry. I was being nosy. Sometimes, living here with my family, I forget that the whole world isn't like us. Here, let's sit for a second.”

She plopped down in the shade of a wide tree and spread out her long skirt. They were just outside the edge of the fencing that held all the chickens, and rows of smaller trees he couldn't identify. The air was warmer than he was used to, but it was fresh, and blowing gently in unpredictable ways. Like standing next to an air vent and not; it was everywhere at once. James thought if he lay down here, he'd quickly fall asleep.

“It's okay,” he told her. “I just need some time to get used to it all. Understand everything. I...I don't understand what to do with myself. Everyone's just given me orders all my life, and now … this.” He spread out a hand at the hills surrounding them. Even just this tiny valley was unimaginably large. “Like, I could get up now and start walking, and no one would stop me, right? I could keep going forever. Two days ago, I couldn't imagine it. I'd never even been outside.”

She shuddered and stared up at the filtered light through the tree. “Not gonna lie, it sounds horrible. It _was_ horrible; you know that, right? That's not the way human beings should be forced to live. Jarod's always hidden what it was like for him, but I saw some in my cousin's mind, and my mom...” Miriam cut off, as if that were a taboo topic. “It's weird to think that if Mom hadn't gotten out, we might have been raised together.”

Involuntarily, James couldn't help but muse on it. To have someone to talk with, to not be alone for all those years, it was one of his deepest fantasies. But thinking realistically he knew it wouldn't have happened that way. “I doubt it. The Centre isn't inclined to let its human projects collaborate. They probably would have taken you to the main building for training, and left me with the lab animals. I am the secret copy, after all.” That came out more bitter than he intended.

“Did you know, uh, before Charles and Emily came for you?”

“Yeah.” He watched the chickens for a second, happily scratching holes in the dirt and grooming each other. Even within the fence, it seemed so natural and healthy. Chicken freedom. “I figured it out when I was, oh, seven. They didn't tell me anything, just that I had special abilities to help people. But it was pretty obvious that Mr. Raines had certain expectations for the way simulations were supposed to go. I guessed wrong all the time, and Mr. Raines would get angry and...” James paused for a few seconds to collect himself, decide how to continue. Oddly enough he didn't feel anything while discussing this, as if his heart were made of stone. “Anyway, I was the only one who lived at Donoterase full-time. And there were a lot of cloning projects there, including monkeys who were born a couple of years before me, I think. They run all these tests on them annually, tissues samples for mRNA and a bunch of functional measures, and one year when I was little I realized they were doing all the same things to me. Sample Day, every year. I think its my birthday.”

Miriam twirled her wavy hair as she watched him talk, mesmerized by the story. Perhaps, just as much as James had imagined what it was like to walk around free, she had wondered about her barely-missed life as a prisoner of the Centre. “And the knee?” she asked softly.

“It's evidence that my body isn't working properly,” James said bluntly. “Exactly what they don't want to hear. I learned a long time ago that my worth was linked to replicating another person, even though they never told me who he was. The problem is, the cloning process is prone to errors in gene expression. Even if you make it past the embryo stage, we tend to be flawed. Systems break down unexpectedly. Animals die or have to be euthanized. There's no such thing as a perfect copy.”

Miriam hesitated, then offered her hand again, palm up. He willingly rested his hand on top of her warm one, this time reveling in the sense of her mind sliding up to his. He was no longer alone; it was hard to believe all of this was real, not an unusually vivid daydream that would be shattered by the next orders or sim. Touching her brought the risk of having his privacy violated, but she was trying to respect his wishes, and it was worth it if only to feel that intimate connection.

 _I know you're not a copy,_ she thought at him, faintly, so as not to distress him. Inwardly he projected appreciation at her, so she could feel it.

_Thanks. I mean, I know I'm not too, even though I don't know anything about Jarod. But it's nice to hear it from someone else._

_Did you get to meet him at all?_

_No. I just saw..._

The memory of Jarod's extraordinary colors projected before he could reign it back. He'd thought Miriam was only capable of hearing language from a non-telepath, but at that instant the silver threads floating in her own colorful aura coalesced towards him, and she caught the image.

_Wait. What was that? Is that how you imagine people? It's beautiful._

James had never told _anyone_ about the colors, not one human soul. The hallucinations were irrefutable proof that his brain was malfunctioning, obviously a developmental problem since he had seen the colors for as long as he could remember. In a panic he considered lying to her or deflecting the conversation, but even as he thought it, she already knew.

_Don't be afraid. You can trust me. I'm your sister, right? Okay, that doesn't mean anything since we just met, but I have to keep secrets too. You're going to have to trust me when I say your mind is not broken._

_I guess you are the expert,_ he reluctantly thought, and she laughed out loud.

_Man, good thing you've never been scanned by my mother. You don't know expert until you've felt her._

_Yes. She is very strong._

_See now, how can you tell if she's never touched you? That image tells you something about people, doesn't it?_

_Not just people. I mean, it's strongest for people, but also all kinds of objects and animals and even numbers and raw data. The colors are everywhere. So you're wrong, Miriam, my brain's obviously defective. I constantly see things that are unreal. What do you call that but a hallucination?_

_You can tell the difference between the images and reality, right? And it gives you consistent information about the world? Doesn't sound like insanity to me. Just a different kind of sense, like our telepathy or Tim's listening to the trees._

_Who's Tim?_

_My cousin. You'll meet him at dinner. Want to talk about cracked brains, he's literally got holes in his. But it still doesn't mean the trees aren't talking. Do you think you can show me again?_

_I don't know..._

_I won't scan you hard or try to pull it. Both of us just close our eyes and you picture something. If I don't see it then I don't see it. Hold onto both of my hands._

_You are kind of bossy, you know that?_

_And you are kind bossable. Just do it, okay, Science Boy?_

With a sigh he gave in, and held out his other hand. Contact with both did strengthen their connection. They both closed their eyes, and in the silence James tried to visualize Miriam to herself, since she was right in front of him. Her colors of red and brown tended to flicker in and out, with the sparkly silver hair-like strands hiding among the fingers of color and whizzing in and out of existence.

_Oh my God is that what I look like? That's totally cool. The colors move kind of like chestnut-shaded fire, have you ever seen a fire?_

_No._ A shiver of fear flushed through him, for he'd always been warned against anything that could start a fire at Donoterase. The lab workers sometimes made morbid jokes about the lack of safety escape routes and how, in the event of a chemical fire, they'd all be burnt to a crisp.

_Fire flickers like that. Only without the silver stuff of course. It's neat how you can see the colors and the real person at the same time, in, like, layers. Except my face looks weird from there._

_You look beautiful._ Immediately James felt embarrassed, for the words slipped past his mind's filter before he could register that it might be inappropriate. Miriam didn't find it creepy, though, but instead seemed to be a little pleased.

_Open your eyes and look around. Maybe I see from direct sensory input. I know my mom can._

He obeyed, and instantly heard an _oh, wow._ Wonderment flooded his consciousness, flowing in directly from her. James had to resist the urge to close his eyes again, just to wallow in the unbridled emotions of another person.

Then: _Can you look somewhere else because I look too weird sitting there with my eyes closed. Ooh, the chickens, look at the chickens and the orchard._

James shifted his attention to the white and brown blobs milling under neat rows of trees. Animals also had colors, although often the form of it was influenced by skin or fur color until he got to know their personalities. The cooing birds had a mostly a whitish-yellow flare with occasional red streaks, sort of the default colors for “life form.” There had been a genetically engineered egg project once at Donoterase, so he'd seen them before, but of course not like this, just milling about outside doing natural chickeny-things like napping in the dirt.

But as soon as James glanced away from her, he could sense Miriam pulling on his mind in an uncomfortable way. _Stop...stop that,_ he sent, instead of ripping his hand away.

 _Oh, sorry._ She dropped the visual connection, although she kept holding his hands, and he mourned its loss. _But dude, you need glasses._

_What! No I don't._

_Uh, yeah. Those chickens are like thirty feet from us and you can barely see them. Let alone the house or the forest._

_You can see the house from here?_

_Yup. Close your eyes and I'll show you._

The scene from her perspective suddenly popped into his head as soon as he complied, and James was simultaneously fascinated and disconcerted. There was not a trace of the visual color illusions. Instead the hillside was bright and crystal clear, albeit with a more blueish tinge. Miriam could see that the individual leaves on the trees varied from deep green to almost yellow, and there was some kind of immature fruit hanging on the trees above the chickens. She could see the individual faces on the birds, even in the next paddock over. She could see the large white farmhouse down the hill, and a man sitting on the porch watching them with interest, whom through Miriam he somehow knew was her cousin Tim.

_Why wasn't this ever noticed before!? All those tests…_

_I dunno. You lived in small rooms, maybe there was never an opportunity to notice before now. You probably got along just fine._

_And maybe they just assumed I'd be the same as Jarod._

James was angry about it, and futilely trying to hide his anger. Out of all the things to be upset about, he knew this one was petty, for it was easily fixable. But it was hard not to see it as yet another betrayal of his broken body. Failure at every turn.

But then he looked up at his sister, who merely grinned at him and lobbed him some comfort and amusement. _It'll be okay. Let's go back down now and let my aunts feed you. You'll feel better after that. I'll hold your hand on the way down so you don't run into anything._

And with that, the absurdity of the situation hit him, and even James managed a smile. At the end of it all, today was a happy day.

 


	3. Around and around on the merry-go-round

Up in the Tower, Miss Parker popped a champagne cork to celebrate with Daddy. Success at last! _Freedom_ at last, her bargain with her father finally fulfilled. What a misbegotten vow that had turned out to be. When she first agreed to it, Jarod in her mind was merely the savantic lab rat who'd gotten a little too curious about the outside. There had been no reason to think Sydney wouldn't be able to reel him in, as he'd always done. But then Jarod had discovered the truth – or some of the truth, at least – about his family and the true purpose of the sims, and from that moment the whole chase had turned into something malevolent and corrupting. Parker knew they would never be able to hold him, no matter how much pressure was brought to bear; she gave it a week after his leg healed up enough to walk for Jarod to escape again. The Centre did love its lies and illusions, and one of them was that Jarod was controllable.

Well. Not really her problem, now, was it?

“Wonderful job, sweetheart,” Daddy was saying, and it was tough not to bask in the glow of parental approval for a few moments. “Of course, it's a shame the boy got away.”

 _The boy._ The poor cloned child destined to be forever in Jarod's shadow. Talk about lab rats. Even Miss Parker wouldn't doom a kid to live under Raines' tender parental influence. “I told you of my doubts about that project's viability. Sure, the boy was probably a genius, but even under Sydney's tutelage, he seemed miserable and depres...”

“I received no reports of emotional problems,” Mr. Parker said, cutting her off and frowning. “He was quite obedient right up until he let himself be kidnapping right under our noses.”

 _Obedient, my ass. Terrified of the wheezing ghoul, you mean,_ Parker thought. She poured herself another glass of bubbly. “If he's just like Jarod, Daddy, he probably on some level wanted to know what was outside the Centre. How can you expect your little projects to be perfect simulators of the world, and not have them rebel and want to be out in the real thing?”

Mr. Parker's frown deepened, and Miss Parker coolly sipped her drink. As much as she loved her father, she had exactly zero fucks left to give. Her task was completed. The cat and mouse game was over.

“If you were in charge of the Centre,” her father said carefully, “how would you have handled it? Hypothetically of course.”

Parker stared at him, not bothering to hide her astonishment. Wasn't this just turning into a hell of a conversation. “Isn't that Lyle's job, to be your heir apparent?” she spat.

“Humor me, angel. What would you have done?”

“From the beginning? I'd have gone with honey, not vinegar. Jarod is obviously perfectly capable of handling himself outside these walls. The protective shtick was an utter miscalculation on Sydney's part. If you'd given him a nice office when he was sixteen and let him out on the weekends to eat Cheetohs all day, Boy Wonder would still be happily working for us.”

“And is that how you'd recommend we proceed now?”

 _Now?_ After three years of taunting and lies and threats, how much more evidence did they need that Jarod would never again meekly submit? “No. Jarod knows too much. It's far too late to hope for voluntary cooperation, not without massive leverage.” Parker downed her drink, willing herself to bring this meeting to its natural closure. “But I'm not in charge of the Centre. I'm sure Lyle has some creative ideas on how to get your monkey to cooperate. You'll have my request to transfer back to Corporate by the end of the day. I'm done with Jarod, Daddy, and I’m done with the Pretender project.”

Mr. Parker pulled a cigar out of a hidden drawer and snipped and lit it with lackadaisical ease. “What if I don't want you back in Corporate? There's still the matter of the two children to locate, along with Angelo.”

“Then I'll have to start updating my resume. I'm sure somewhere there's a company willing to pay quite well for someone of my talents.” There, she had finally said it. Her ultimate threat. “Let the boy go, and the telepaths too. Chasing after them only brings the Centre's past involvement in … questionable child disappearances to light. Just like I'm sure all the surrogates and egg donors we used to create Gemini were completely above board, too.”

“We have legal custody of him. We _created_ him. Gemini is one of the Centre's greatest technical achievements, perhaps even greater than Sydney's work with Jarod.”

“Would you listen to yourself, Daddy? He's a _boy,_ not the Centre's personal plaything. Don't stand around trying to argue the legality of the situation. I shot a grown man and dragged him into involuntary servitude just for you. Let's not delude ourselves that we hold the moral upper hand here.”

And with that, she slammed the glass down on his desk and turned on her heel, turned on her angry father, astonished that his daughter could be angry too.

* * * * *

She didn't march straight for her office like she'd threatened, but instead headed down to seven, the medward. Before tending her resignation, she needed to close it out with Jarod, somehow. She knew from reports that the artery in his leg had been severed, and the surgeons had struggled to save the limb below the knee. Ah well, the head was the important body part, when you got down to brass tacks. Jarod would probably be out of it from the drugs, but for whatever reason she felt the need to confront him anyway.

Outside the secure ward, Parker found a couple of stern-faced sweepers acting as guards, and a distraught Sydney trying to hide under the cover of professional concern. There was something comforting – normalizing – about Syd's presence, although she hadn't laid eyes on him in over six months. Everything was back to where it belonged in the world.

“Miss Parker!” Sydney urgently called. “I have been denied access to Jarod. Can you...”

“Well, technically Syd, you're no longer assigned to Jarod's project. Too bad his young duplicate's flown the coop.” At his distraught look – well, distraught by Sydney's usual bucolic standards – she softened her own stance. “I'll see what I can do. Fill out your paperwork for the proper assignment, would you? I'm sure my father wants someone to calm Jarod down. After forty-odd years, you'd think you know how this place works. Good to see you again too.”

And without fielding any more of his annoying complaints, she stared down the guards. Miss Parker sure as hell had authorization access to Jarod, until the bitter end.

She entered the room, and drew in a deep breath. Jarod was immobilized on his back, both by the multiple pins holding what was left of his leg together, and by restraints at his wrists, ankles and neck. He looked unnaturally pale and gaunt, as if he'd lost an enormous amount of blood. It was unnerving to see what was practically a force of nature sick and disabled.

He opened his eyes at her approach. Glassy, unfocused, numbed. “Miss Parker,” he said, his voice raspy. “Come to gloat?”

“No,” Parker replied. “I just wanted to see how you were doing.”

Jarod managed to chuckle at that. “Just fine, thanks. You planning on finishing the job? I might welcome that.”

“No,” she repeated. “Sydney's waiting for you outside.”

“Of course he is. I take it that means Gemini got away? Oddly enough, they won't tell me anything. Even Lyle, and you know what a chatterbox he is.”

The _Lyle_ sent a shiver down her back. Lord only knew what he had been torturing Jarod with. “I have no information about the Gemini project,” she told him, although it was a lie. “But Sydney wants to come back over to you.”

“I'll take it that's a yes. Emily? My father?”

The mention of Major Charles sent a wave of anger over Parker, but for once she repressed it. She hadn't sorted out the truth from fiction in this case. “I have no information about them, either,” she said, blandly. He got the hint.

“Miss Parker, come closer. I want to tell you something.” She leaned in, confident that he had no capacity to hurt her in his current state. “Last time we talked, it was about choices. You’ve got to make a conscious choice now. Leave,” Jarod whispered. “Leave while you still have the chance. The window of opportunity will be short, and then they'll have you in their web again.”

It was hard not to give Jarod a withering glare, for was his wise advice anything she didn't already know? Instead she was the one to lean into his ear. “I'll keep that in mind. 13467.”

Jarod's dark eyes went wide for a second, before he regained control, nodded curtly, and once again gave an unfocused gaze at the ceiling. Parker released her clasp of his bedside and turned to walk out.

The numbers were part of the street address for the hidden Wallace property, the address Parker had sat on for over five months. She was letting him know that she knew where his daughter was, where his recently escaped doppelganger had likely been taken, and where his lover and Angelo and their family were hiding out. And Miss Parker had no plans to do anything with that information. Jarod instinctively recognized the quid pro quo: Be a good little Pretender, let Miss Parker have her life, and she would grant his family's lives in return. A deal she knew he would always make. The only foolish thing about Jarod was his deluded devotion to his loved ones, and to his vulnerable, involuntary children most of all.

Not that Miss Parker knew anything about irrational loyalty to family.

“Wait,” Jarod said, just as she reached the door. “Stay a minute. Talk to me, please.”

 _Talk?_ Jarod must really hard up, or desperately bored, to want her to lounge around for a friendly chat. “What could you possibly want to talk about?”

“Anything. Very soon I'm not going to have anyone to talk to, except for Sydney, and that one’s still up in the air. Maybe you could…” He hesitated, or spaced out a second; it was hard to tell. “What do you remember about your mother?” he finally asked.

And at that, Parker wanted to throw her head back and outright cackle. “You know what, Jarod?” she said, marching back up to his bedside. “I’m done with all this emotionally manipulative bullshit. You want to talk, maybe you should tell _me_ something about my mother that I don’t know. I’m guessing you haven’t dangled every last bit of dirt that you’ve dug up in my face yet. Was there anything that _I_ would find interesting in the files that Angelo stole, or my mother’s safety deposit boxes that you illegally accessed, or the mountain of disks from Pakor, or the data annexes I know you’ve been having our mutual Funyun dweeb tunnel into, or from the damned head of your telepathic girlfriend? Surely _she_ _’s_ overheard some tasty tidbits in her time at the Centre. You want to make nice like we’re friends, give me something Jarod, of your own free will, instead of waiting for the inevitable interrogation like the stubborn ass you are.”

He gave her that enigmatic smile that made her want to punch him straight on the mouth. But his words were amused, not mocking. “Fair enough. Did Sister Harriet tell you about her and Catherine’s friendship when they were at seminary together?”

“Yes.” She’d gone back to see Harriet Tashman after the debacle with Kyle and the near-miss capturing Jarod a year ago. And for once his trail didn’t lead to complete dead ends, but to one of her mother’s old friends, who had known Catherine Parker long before she was a Parker. “She was quite the talker on my mother’s fiery free spirit, or some such bullshit. She was never like that when I was a kid. Sweet and loving yes, but also mopey and submissive. Always going around people’s backs instead of confronting things head-on.” Enough time had passed that Parker could now admit these unsavory things about her mother. She wasn’t Saint Catherine, even in Miss Parker’s dimming memory.

“She did what she had to do to survive your father, and Raines. And she protected you from them, which is no small thing, especially with her mental illness.”

Parker snorted and waved a dismissive hand. “Was she really crazy, or was that from this place? The Centre’s enough to drive anyone to wash down Mother’s Little Helper with a gin and tonic.”

“Based on her diaries and some conversations with people who knew her, I think Sydney’s bipolar diagnosis was correct, even before she met your father. Although, what is crazy? Is it crazy to be depressed when you come into contact with evil? Crazy to see demons everywhere when the real-life Devil has stolen your children, like my mother?”

“You finally found her, I take it.” Despite herself, Miss Parker was fascinated by Jarod’s uncharacteristic chattiness — to the point she wondered whether Raines had already shot him up with sodium pentothal in an attempt to get Jarod to loosen his lips. Well, two could take advantage of that.

“No,” Jarod said, his head lolling to one side while his eyes flashed with impotent rage. “We were going to see her, but then the opportunity to rescue Gemini came up, and…”

“And I got to you first. Tough luck, Jarod. Sorry not sorry. You didn’t think I would ever actually do it, but like everyone else, you underestimated me.”

“ _Overestimated,_ you mean. I did think you would let me go, or at least refrain from blowing my femur out.” Jarod shifted uncomfortably a fraction of an inch, the latent pain cracking through to his face. “But I guess if it was between me getting tortured and my family, I do prefer me. Thank you for letting the boy go.”

“I didn’t _let_ him go, I was merely focused on you,” Parker said, although that was more for the eager cameras in the room than for him. She stood straight up, angry again for no particular reason, _done_ with him, this place, the whole Pretender mess. “Was there anything else you wanted to share, before I wash my hands of the past three years?”

“No. Take care, Miss Parker. Learn from your mother’s mistakes, and think about what I said.”

She scoffed, one last time. “I can think for myself, Jarod.” And Miss Parker strode out on her leave, before the inevitable _can you?_ reached her ears.

 

*****

Once Miss Parker left, Jarod was free to both mentally roam and shore up his feverish mind. Fantasy and internal sims were a long-practiced mode of escape, but now he needed discipline to face what was likely ahead. His brain was already sluggish mud through the drugs, which he estimated included hefty doses of painkillers, a muscle relaxant, Valium, and either sodium theopental or some other Centre-invented truth serum with a disinhibiting effect. He’d begged the nurse to withhold the narcotics at least, preferring the clarity of excruciating pain over the fluffy paralysis of painkillers. She ignored him, and dosed him up even more. It worried Jarod that they were willing to to drug his mind to such a degree. For one thing, it was a sign that Raines likely had gained the upper hand in the inevitable power struggle over who would control him, for the evil old man had always been more willing than Mr. Parker to push his subjects until they broke. Parker, for all his conniving faults, at the end of the day wanted his programs to be successful and his Pretenders to be pragmatically functional. Raines, on the other hand, cared more about his horrific curiosity and warped sense of power than any sort of output.

While lying there in foggy discomfort, Jarod tried to assess his options. He’d long ago forecast the Centre’s likely responses should he be captured, and now tried to adjust them in light of the specific circumstances that had come to pass. Addicting him to narcotics or benzodiazepines: 89 percent probability. Torture: 75 percent before, 97 percent if Raines or Lyle were in charge. Sleep disruption, sensory deprivation and other non-invasive mind control techniques: Up to 90 percent, depending on his behavior. Use of immobility for longer than a few days he’d previously put at 45 percent, although thanks to Miss Parker that now shot up to a hundred. It would be at least a month before he could put any weight on the leg, by which time he’d have to patiently endure physiotherapy to make up for muscle loss. Use of Sydney to manipulate him: 95 percent under Mr. Parker, only 30 percent under Raines. The fact that Sydney wasn’t in here obliquely shoring up his so-called fragile psyche was yet another bad sign of the new order.

Threats against his family, friends, or random members of the populace: One hundred percent.

It was his Achilles heel and everyone in the situation knew it. The Centre had even used the same technique on him before, on his last sim before escaping. And of course Miss Parker slung it at him too, albeit not for the same motivations as the Centre. Now that Jarod knew the full extent of the abuses of his simulations, there would be no more pretense that the Centre was a benign organization, or of voluntary cooperation. And he had so many more loved ones and connections now, which translated into a feast of ways for the Centre to bring pressure to bear. Now it was a matter of how much hypothetical risk he was willing to expend by completing a given sim, versus the very real risk to people he knew if he refused to cooperate.

Miss Parker wouldn’t leak his family’s address under ordinary circumstances — he’d learned as far back as the Davy Simpkins case that she would take action when children were concerned, as long as she had some cover of plausible deniability. Despite her protests, Parker was very like her mother, but with more of an instinctual sense of self-preservation. But if Miss Parker could track down the address, then so could Lyle, sooner or later. He should have moved them, Jarod realized with horror; he should have insisted that nowhere could be safe for thirteen years. The Wallace farm had been a place where he’d indulged his lifelong dreams of true refuge, of belonging. They didn’t let Jarod hang around simply out of gratitude that he had helped them, like so many of his Pretends, but because he was one of them. Not that he regretted any of his activities since escaping the Centre, but it had all been as an outsider looking in. Like an angel sweeping down for the heavens to help people, but angels weren’t human. They didn’t engage or reach out in friendship; they could be adored, but couldn’t love back. And by leaving clues and dragging the Centre to all of those Pretends, now every one of those people was in a danger they never knew existed. If the Centre couldn’t find Miriam or Annalise or Gemini, then maybe they would drag in Nia, or Kevin Bailey, or Jeannette and Michael Connelly, or Nicky Parks, or Jeremy Harper. The Centre wouldn’t care if they were children or innocent civilians, or if they had no useful knowledge of Jarod or his family. All Lyle and his ilk cared about was forcing Jarod to their bidding, by any means necessary.

Jarod tried to shift those gloomy thoughts towards avenues of escape, increasingly rarefied given how well he was currently immobilized. If they expected him to do simulations, however, they couldn’t restrain him forever, so holding out those few weeks while the leg healed remained his greatest priority. For hours he lay there while the narcotics slowly wore off, but the nurse still wandered in every few hours to bolus him with the non-anesthetizing portion of the drug cocktail. The pain in his immobilized leg incrementally dialed up to a burning agony, spreading through his hip up to the muscles in his back, all of which screamed to move. Eventually he could detect the insidious effects of the pain and soporifics on his mind, a slow slide over to complete mental fogginess and inability to concentrate, heightened anxiety and emotional lability, impulsivity. A more subtle form of mind control than he normally gave the Centre credit for, he had to grudgingly admit. Soon, Jarod knew, he might not be able to self-analyze at all, and therein lay the danger to his family. He should wall them off, compartmentalize and forget key details as soon as possible while he still had the capacity, before the real torture began. But the temptation was strong to wallow in memory and sims, to escape into himself as he had always done in times of boredom or stress. It was his standard means of coping _before_ that is, before his escape into a stimulating world where so much was new, and the old only invaded through flashbacks and obsession. Trapped back in dreary halls of the Centre, Jarod’s mind fell into well-worn rusted ruts. He closed his eyes against the anchoring halogen light on the ceiling, and drifted off into free simming.

He dreamed of Miss Parker first, likely because his spirited opponent was fresh in his mind. The paths before her were open right now, a rare opportunity in which escape from the Centre raised to significant probability. She was close to breaking off and defying her father, Jarod decided. She’d let Gemini go. She’d let Miriam go. She’d never let _him_ go, being as stubborn as he was in her duties, but if she were newly emancipated herself, Miss Parker would probably look the other way and then raise an amused toast once he escaped again.

Then he dreamed of Gemini, the Centre’s more recent escapee. He’d only gotten a glimpse of the boy at the rescue, but his face was indeed a flashback from a mirror of twenty-five years ago. Time was hard to measure here, but he guessed it had been at least a couple of days since the shooting, so his father with Emily and his son would have made it to Oregon by now. Technically he could think of the boy as his brother with equal accuracy, and consider Major Charles as father to them both. But Jarod strongly felt that Gemini had been created from a stolen piece of himself, just like Miriam. The exact source of the cells from his body didn’t matter very much. The two children were intertwined in his mind now, sharing the same fate, and their future was his responsibility. He felt guilt for not being there for Gemini’s transition to the real world, but shoved that thought off. At least the boy had a place to go, and people who would care about him and for him, far more than Jarod himself had when he’d first run from the Centre’s clutches. He imagined Miriam would teach Gemini all about living in the sun, since he couldn’t do it himself.

Jarod thoughts drifted around Angelo and his extraordinary teeming perception, and Annalise with her laser-focused one, which nevertheless caressed his own mind like the flat of a knife. He dreamed of his sister, adventurous and free, and the closed-away mother he still hadn’t met. It was hard to tell the difference between free-simming and memories, between imagination and dreams.

At some uncertain point, Lyle entered the room.

He was quiet, so at first Jarod sluggishly thought it was the nurse from the small movements around him. But then he cracked open his eyelids and saw the tall figure with dark hair hovering at the foot of the bed. Staring at him, no trace of a smile.

“Awake I see,” Lyle said, and then Jarod knew it wasn’t a figment of free-simming. He’d visited before, for no other reason than Jarod was restrained, and Lyle was simply the sort that couldn’t let a good captive go to waste. “You know the drill, Jarod. Tell me where the girl is and this will all be over. Maybe we’ll even let you see her again.”

Jarod knew _the girl_ wasn’t Miriam, although that played well for the cameras. He really meant Annalise. She had been his responsibility at Donoterase all those years ago, and after months of personal torture she had humiliated him and escaped. A man like Lyle, obsessed, would wait for decades for retribution.

“I wouldn’t know,” Jarod said. “They are under orders to move to an undisclosed location if any one of us were captured.” He’d spun this lie the previous two times Lyle had been in for a “friendly chat,” although it was probably not convincing.

And indeed, Lyle scoffed at him all over again. “Please. We’ve detected no unusual activity among that brain-damaged nut’s extended family. Plus you expect me to believe that the great, lonely Jarod would allow his family to slip away from him, with no way to get back into contact?” He pulled up a seat at Jarod’s head, all the better to lean over and whisper in his prisoner’s ear. But for now he kept the tone civil, conversational. “I _know_ you, Jarod. Know all about what motivates you, what makes you tick. You’ll sit here and endure endless pain and humiliation, and bide your time. At some point you’ll Pretend to give in, all in a pretense to escape. You might genuinely give an inch to save a person’s life, but otherwise will fake through with that lying face to the ends of the Earth to get your pathological way.”

At that, Jarod really did snort, as the absurd words cut through his pain-induced mental fog. “Pathological. I think only one of us is the sociopath here, Lyle. Has there ever been a single person you actually cared about, anywhere, at any time? Even Raines and your own father abandoned you through your childhood. Didn’t even care enough to make you a Centre subject, or a child-pet like Miss Parker.”

“That argument would lend more weight if I weren’t here at their bidding, so who’s the golden boy now? Plus my loved ones aren’t really the topic up for discussion today. My father didn’t abandon me any more than yours did. He didn’t know I existed. On the other hand, you know Major Charles knew you were in here for all those decades? That he chose to hide his _new_ kid over rescuing you and your brother?”

“He made the right decision,” Jarod retorted, although privately it stung a bit. It would always wound, the way they had told him his parents had more or less given him to the Centre, even though he knew Sydney had been lied to. But Sydney too hadn’t made much effort to discover the uncomfortable truth.

“Your mother and father gave up on getting you from the Centre. Your brother hated your guts and blamed you for his crazy. Your sister got to live and travel the world while you were trapped in a room for thirty years endlessly doing sims. Why not just admit, Jarod, that they were right? That the best and only place for you is right here, obeying orders, and not screwing up their lives?”

Lyle reached his hand over and rested it on Jarod’s brow, stroking his forehead. From almost anyone else in the world it would have been a pleasant comfort, the sort of thing Jarod normally craved, but from the monster that small gesture was a horrific reminder of his captivity. Jarod squirmed, but the restraints still held him tight. _Probability of sexual assault: only 15 percent,_ some part of his brain supplied. One thing Sydney had always protected him from, at least overtly. Jarod had lowballed his estimate despite Lyle’s known proclivities, after his analysis indicated Lyle’s victims had all been vulnerable women, and he seemed to have masculine identity issues wrapped up in his mental pathology. But there was always the possibility that Jarod had guessed wrong.

As if reading his mind, Lyle suddenly laughed and patted the top of his head like he was a small child. “Don’t worry, Jarod. I know exactly what you’re thinking, and you’re right: You’re not my type. But of course you know…” He hunched over from his stool to whisper intimately in Jarod’s ear. “…there are more pleasing subjects I’d rather play with. Thanks to you bringing the Centre’s attention back onto Angelo’s crackerjack family, I got a team waiting to put both their brains in a petri dish, one live thin sliver at a time. What is that woman to you? The mother of a child you never asked for, someone who _gets_ you, someone to sleep with despite — I’m sure she told you — being very used goods? I think she’s more than your lover. I bet, in the back of that needy mind of yours, you already think of her as your wife.”

“Annalise was right,” Jarod gritted out. “The real torture is being forced to listen to you talk.”

At that, Lyle reached over and yanked viciously on the brace full of pins holding the shards of Jarod’s leg together. Jarod almost swallowed his tongue biting back the scream. “How old’s your kid now? Thirteen by my math. Starting to grow up, I bet. I was there when she was conceived, you know. When we took some of your stolen sperm and her eggs in a dish and injected it all up into your rebellious girlfriend. I can’t tell how much I look forward to catching what I’m sure is a sweet ripe little genius, and seeing the product of our work first-hand. I’m guessing thirteen is not too old to still be _trainable._ ”

Jarod smashed down his hands and tried to rip them out of his restraints in his impotent rage. _“You will never find them,”_ he hissed through his dry throat. “I will die before I give any scrap of information to you.”

“Unfortunately, we already know that. But will you live to save them too?” Lyle straightened and stood up, and kicked some latches at the bottom of the table Jarod was chained to. Some unseen orderlies came in behind Lyle and silently began to move what Jarod groggily noted was actually a mobile medical bed.

“Let me explain what’s going to happen now,” Lyle said, walking behind Jarod’s head. The bumpy ride felt like excruciating lightening shocks up Jarod’s backside as they moved. “If you cooperate, the questions about the address will stop. Every sim will give your precious family another week or so of not being hunted down. And as a bonus, I’ve been instructed to tell you that we’ll even hold back the more objectionable military sims, at least for awhile. The Centre thinks you’ll just sabotage them anyway, so they’ve got some softballs lined up for you at the beginning, with known outcomes so your lying face can’t cheat. Get you back in the swing of the game.” He stopped before a nondescript double door, but didn’t push in. “One life for many, Jarod. You know that’s as good a deal as the Centre will ever offer you.”

“Why should I believe you?” Jarod asked. “You could easily send out sweeper teams behind my back, even if I do your damnable simulations.” He no longer thought of the sims as his own, he realized. It would just be mouthing someone else’s will now, albeit in his name.

“True,” Lyle replied. “That’s why we’ve arranged alternate leverage right here at the Centre. Someone you haven’t whisked away to freedom yet.”

They slammed his bed into the room, and Jarod’s eyes swam from the jarring bump of pain and sudden bright lights. When his vision cleared, he made out the familiar visage of a silver-haired man tied to chair, the left side of his face and brow covered in bruises and blood.

“Sydney,” choked out Jarod. In all his simulations, somehow he never considered this. For nearly forty years Sydney had been loyal to the Centre, now he was on Jarod’s side of the glass?

Sydney raised his battered head at their entrance to gaze at his immobilized protege. As Jarod expected from a lifetime working with Sydney, he didn’t seem frightened, or angry, or judgmental. Just a bit sad, as if he thought he could escape this fate of being used to imprison and manipulate Jarod all over again.

“Your old mentor’s stars have fallen quite a bit in the past few days, I’m afraid,” Lyle said. “Really, you should do a better job of encrypting emails when engineering a clone break-out, Syd. The Centre knows you conspired with Jarod to free Gemini. We know you lied straight to the Triumvirate, which does take guts of steel, I got to admit. Now we’re taking a look at whether Jarod’s original breakout was the act of incompetence we thought it was, or something more.” He leaned over Jarod again, and lightly rested his hand right at Jarod’s throat. “The two of you have work to do. Together, again, at last.”

  



	4. Reboot

_Year 8, blue week 47, day 6._ Even just over the space of four days from Donoterase, it no longer felt like the weeks were blue or red. Miriam and Emily had taught him the outside world’s dating system the evening before, which James had intellectually been aware of before from computer monitors, history books, diligently labeled petri dishes and such, but he’d never integrated it into his mental calender before. Now he tried to do so, and found that it was almost a split in his mind: Donoterase, and Not-Donoterase. _June 4, 1999._ Friday, the last day of something called the “work week,” although that hardly seemed to impact them on the farm so far as James could tell. Of course, he hadn’t experienced the “weekend” yet so perhaps that was a premature judgment. It apparently did matter for getting appointments with medical professionals, who, James was surprised to learn, did not work on Saturday and Sunday unless it was for emergency services at the hospital. Thus Annalise had made arrangements to visit a vision specialist today. James wasn’t sure he was up for driving into town, as learning the norms of this one family seemed complicated enough for his second day, but Miriam had insisted he not go another three days without seeing the world clearly. He was indeed curious what that would look like.

The previous day, after an exhausting introduction to all the Wallace family members, a noisy dinner, and helping Miriamlock up chickens for the night, James had slept for a record nine hours straight. Normally he was signaled to wake up when the lights in his room snapped on, but here the bright morning sunlight crept up through the windows slowly and unobtrusively, and his mind didn’t register that it was morning at all. So when he did wake up he’d found all the upstairs bedrooms empty, as everyone had already gotten up at some undetermined time before. Someone had left extra clothes for him sitting on a dresser — things leftover from yet another cousin, Miriam had told him — which he diligently put on. The pants were made of a stiff blue material that James didn’t like compared to his normal soft cotton clothes, but its thickness was probably appropriate for farm labor. He decided it would be rude to complain, and went downstairs, following the delicious smell of eggs and bacon. That he did recognize.

Annalise, Miriam and their strange cousin Tim were sitting at the table with food in front of them, while Emily was sitting off to one side, speaking softly and urgently into a mobile phone. Annalise had dark marks under her eyes and her colors were dulled, as if she hadn’t slept well. She was worried about Jarod, his donor, who had been both shot in the leg and recaptured. Miriam’s mindspeech had indicated they had some kind of romantic attachment, which Miriam herself thought of with affection and approval. She, too was worried about Jarod at the Centre, although she was better at hiding it and thinking of other things. They were right to be concerned in James’ judgment, for Mr. Raines’ reindoctrination was likely to be severe.

“James, honey, I’m glad you’re awake,” Annalise said, forcing a smile. “I was about to send Miriam up to rouse you from the dead. Your appointment’s at eleven, but you have time for some eggs, if you want some.”

“Yes. Thank you,” said James. “Do you have any news about Jarod?” As he spoke, Miriam slid over next to him and touched his hand, so he could hear her thoughts and Annalise’s reply at the same time.

“We’ve confirmed he was at the Blue Cove complex’s medward as of yesterday and he’s had some kind of surgery,” Annalise said. Her colors shifted over to gray and silver as she spoke, as if she wanted to pound something with that extraordinary mind of hers, but had nothing to target. “After that, Broots can’t tell. Presumably drugging him up and letting him heal at the same time.”

_She_ _’s really upset,_ Miriam sent simultaneously.

_I can tell,_ James replied. _Her colors keep changing._

_She was afraid to go with them to help rescue you. But she thinks if she went along, she could have stopped that Centre lady from shooting him. Which is ridiculous, she was like forty feet away from them when she fired. How would Mom have gotten close enough to touch her?_

_Wait, how do you know that? I didn’t show you that._ Plus he could barely see in the sunlight and fainted about two seconds afterward, but Miriam was tactful enough not to mention that.

_I got it from Tim, who got it from Emily. We’re all analyzing the scene, you know, like it’s television and we are investigators. Not that it matters now._

_Can you show me too?_ James asked.

_Ehhhh, I’m not supposed to. Mom said no images for awhile. She says you’re having a hard enough time adjusting without brain strain too. Even with Jarod, she eased him into images. Even readers black out sometimes, I guess._

_What? Tell her I’m adjusting just fine,_ he thought, almost insulted. Okay, even waking up had been difficult, but he was muddling through and figuring things out. _Plus I didn’t feel anything when you were projecting yesterday._

_I know, right?? You could do it just fine. You and Emily both are like the most proficient readers ever. Or, like, maybe proto-telepaths, like some of my farther relatives, strength can be diluted when you marry out. Or on that note, maybe it’s because we’re related?_

_She does have some of the silver._ James glanced over at Emily, who was now trying not to shout into her phone.

Annalise interrupted their train of thought by sliding a plate in front of James. Scrambled eggs and a homemade blueberry muffin. She was frowning at their obvious mindtalking, so James dropped Miriam’s hand in order to scarf down the food. Annalise hadn’t told them to stop — in fact, it seemed to break family etiquette to interfere in private mindtalking — but it seemed to James that something about it bothered her. Miriam didn’t seem to notice, or ignored it without direct orders to the contrary. He decided, in the spirit of his new life, to be honest with her.

He slid over his hand towards Annalise, palm up. Both Annalise’s and Miriam’s colors shifted in surprise, and James saw Annalise’s silver sword emerge for a second before she shoved it back down. Likewise, he took a deep breath and repressed his own nervousness.

When her cool hand touched his own, he projected: _Is it okay that I mindtalk with Miriam? You seem uncomfortable_.

Annalise smiled, relieving some of his jitters. _It’s fine. I just want both of you to be aware of your limits. She’s old enough that she doesn’t need my permission, but she’s just starting to learn good judgment._ Her words were clear as razor-edged crystal. Although, to James’ surprise, he did feel a slight strain on his mind. Like Annalise had to push in, while with Miriam the exchange was completely effortless. _Most people cannot do what you are doing right away, James. Even Jarod required training to take full sensory information. A normal mind would have blacked out._

_My mind isn’t normal?_ He tried to hide his dismay, but really, what did he expect? Of course his mind was strange, he already knew that.

_Abnormal isn’t a dirty word around here,_ she told him, and sent a gentle whisper of reassurance too. _You are free to be whatever you are, so long as it doesn’t hurt others. Look around, you are far from the weirdest one here._ Then he felt a certain directionality in his mind, pointing to her cousin Tim, the one so damaged by Mr. Raines that his colors were never the same twice. He almost seemed to have anti-colors, like he was sucking in everything around him, a human singularity or black hole.

_I guess that’s true. I haven’t talked to Tim much yet, sorry._

_You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to. He’’ll never be much of a talker. But Tim knows what it is like to be at the mercy of Raines, even more than you. Maybe it would be good for you to, I don’t know, commiserate._

Annalise paused a long instant, and James was about to let go of her hand. Mr. Raines really wasn’t a subject he was comfortable with addressing with her, not yet. Suddenly, though, she shifted thoughts.

_I have to tell you something, James, and I want you to know that you do not have to respond. But it’s something I’ve held inside myself for a long time._

_Okay._ He was both frightened and curious, for they had just met, so what could be relevant that she had carried for a long time?

As if she had caught that last idle thought — which, probably, she had — Annalise told him, _When I was at Donoterase, years ago when they made me pregnant with Miriam. I knew you were there. Your caretakers used to carry you around in the halls sometimes, speaking softly for many hours of the day, and I could feel your mind. A totally normal, healthy little baby boy mind, by the way. I wanted to escape, and I wanted to take you with me, because there was no way I was going to leave a baby in the Centre’s dungeon of medical horrors. I know it was the place they raised you, and you probably think of it as home, but for me it will always be the place I was tortured and crushed alive. I thought about it and thought about it, but I could not find a way to escape with you. When I finally did get out, it was not from Donoterase, and I had to take what I could get in order to save Miriam. But I always felt guilty about leaving that little boy behind. I just wanted you to know that, for your entire life, someone has been thinking about you and worried about you. The first day I met Jarod I told him about you, because he was one of the only people in the world who could rescue you._

Annalise let go of his hand before he could formulate a response, and patted his shoulder with a comforting smile. Then she said out loud, “I’m going upstairs for a quick shower and change, then we’ll see about getting you some glasses. Okay?”

James could only nod.

When she had turned her back to go up the stairs, Miriam grabbed his hand. _Oh my God, what did she say? You should see your face._

He held back the flood of emotion, and told her everything.

* * * * *

An hour later James was at the optometrist in a nearby town, trying on frames while Miriam critiqued. Clear plastic sort of blended in with his face, gold metal clashed with it. Red? He kind of liked them, as red was his favorite color, but Miriam had shook her head and told him they were too girly. Subtle gender divisions, another area he knew very little about. Oddly enough, it was easier to remember the older gender caste systems from all the historical books he’d read. They settled on some squarish black plastic ones, which they both decided went with his eyes and hair. Then they had to wait another hour for the lenses, and so ate a nervous lunch while the adults — Annalise, Emily and Major Charles — all sat in a cybercafe making furtive phone calls and emails. James watched them, and watched all the patrons, trying and failing to imagine what everyone was doing with their day, what motivated them to be at that place and at that time, how each person coped with the unimaginable freedom of their lives.

At last the glasses were ready, and when he first put them on, James nearly fell over from difficulty focusing. The world was sparkling clear, but also uncomfortably bright and almost slippery, as if his mind couldn’t get a handle on what it was seeing for the first time. The difference between the imaginary auras and real world sharpened, like the colors were effervescent ghosts floating in a miasma imposed on top of an impossibly clear reality. He clutched Miriam’s hand, blindly reaching for some kind of comfort, and he could tell she was resisting the urge to pull the images from his mind. Instead she said to him, _Take a deep breath, and close your eyes if need to. As the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy says, ‘Don’t Panic’._

_Galaxy…hikers…what?_ Too much at once, it was all too much.

_It’s a funny nonsense book. You can read it with your newfound Super Vision when we get home._

_Are …are we going home? Please tell me we are going home._

Miriam frowned, sensing his anxiety spiking. He did close his eyes for second, to rest them from the disconcerting stimuli, and when he opened them again he found that Miriam had reached out her other hand to her mother. He could sense Annalise on the link in the background, holding herself back so she didn’t intrude on his mind. When he heard words, it was still Miriam talking.

_She says Charles and Emily have to stay out longer for research, but right now we’re going home._ James could tell Miriam was subtly disappointed, for she had wanted to show him around — something about a pretty river, and the library, and an ice cream shop, and the high school where kids were getting out for the summer on that very day. She wanted him to see normal life now that he could in fact see, but even that small desire was too much to process. He suddenly wanted something familiar, something he could latch onto and relax, and the only thing that came to mind was the comforting oblivion of pitch blackness in an underground night.

“The optometrist says it might take a couple of days for the brain to adjust to the new input,” Annalise said, watching him with a worried look. “Let’s get you home and inside, where you can take a break from bright sunlight, okay?”

_You’ll be fine, we can come back to town some other time,_ Miriam told him almost at the same time. _Isn’t it cool that you can see across the street now?_

_Yeah. You’re right, it is cool._ He released his tension in a long breath, just like Dr. Sydney had taught him.

The chickens, he thought absurdly, now he could see all of Miriam’s chickens clearly. He wondered what Donoterase would look like with the glasses, all those indistinct gray walls and green plant trays and the brown monkey clone Sadie eating a red and yellow apple slice, alone because her cage-mate Bertha was gone now. It was still blue week, just like when he left, and the scientists he’d known his entire life likely had no idea he was outside now, their lab animal/pet escaped into the wild. Comforting and absurd.

* * * *

A few days later, hours away from the Wallace farm in a suburb of Portland, Broots shoved his wheeled office chair back with a sigh and tossed yet another candy wrapper towards his basketball garbage bin. It had been a week since Jarod was recaptured, and he had exactly bupkis to tell Annalise and Angelo when they showed up later in the day. Oh, sure, he had tunneled into the mainframe, using some of the many backdoors he’d installed for Miss Parker’s intraspying over the years. Many of those holes had been deleted over in the six months Broots had been out, though. He himself had taught some of the other techs what to look for when they rebuilt the mainframe security a year ago, so really, Broots only had himself to blame. If Jarod were here he’d probably suggest another direct attack on one the Centre’s security annexes, although those too were becoming more like the highly secured mass data centers popping up all over the country to accommodate the rapidly expanding Internet. But of course, Jarod wasn’t here, that was the point. And none of the Wallaces seemed keen to tackle the Centre in person like Jarod would, not that Broots blamed them.

The telepath — he still thought of Annalise as “the telepath” even though he knew Angelo and a bunch of others were telepaths too — would be arriving any minute from wherever their rustic lair was, and she’d hinted she was bringing Jarod’s kid with her for technical assistance. Broots was admittedly curious about her, after seeing Lyle’s file, after hearing Jarod talk about her, after chasing Jarod himself for so long and watching innumerable simulations that kid!Jarod was forced to perform. What were these Centre-molded kids like, in real life? Could he pick her out on the street if he passed her? He doubted a child raised hiding in Timbuktu could really be of hacking assistance, but even taking time off work, he was swamped. He was desperate enough that genius girl help was better than no help, that’s for sure.

Broots’ interest in springing Jarod wasn’t merely philanthropic. Jarod was the one who had blackmailed him away from the Centre to a normal life, but the converse of that was that Jarod was the only one standing in the way of a ferocious, evil organization that wouldn’t hesitate to put a bullet in his and his daughter’s brains. Plus, honestly, Broots felt he owed Jarod a good-faith effort. He _liked_ his new life in a boring suburb of a hip bicycle town, where tech jobs were plentiful but the atmosphere low-pressure, where people actually did go home by dinnertime and take weekends and vacations off. His house was cute, Debbie liked her junior high, the weather was tolerable year-round, and Intel never, ever called him in at three in the morning to try and imprison another man’s life. The only price to pay was changing his name, cutting off all remnants of his family, and enduring the chronic anxiety of a target on his back for the rest of his life. Not a small price, but one he decided he could pay.

There was a curt knock at the door, and peering through the peephole Broots could see a whole cluster of people, including Angelo and Annalise in front and a tall man in back who looked a lot like an older version of Jarod. His father, Major Charles. They’d talked on the phone in the run-up to the Pakor/Donoterase raids, although Broots had never met the man. Nervously he opened the door and bade them a quick entrance, while scanning them for the famous hidden girl…

…and his eyes stopped dead when he reached the boy. He looked _exactly_ like kid Jarod, only with glasses, over-sized blue jeans, and nervous disposition. Broots unapologetically stared at him, knowing it must be the mysterious Gemini. The boy unselfconsciously stared right back.

“Is he Jarod’s…son?” Broots managed to stutter out to Annalise, wincing in his hopefulness.

“Nope. Pretty much what you first thought when you saw him,” she replied.

“Oh my God!” Broots muttered. “The Centre…they… _cloned_ him?” He took a step back, which was ridiculous; obviously the kid was just a kid, albeit one raised in a secret lab of Centre Frankensteins somewhere.

The boy kept staring at him, and was clearly taken aback. “He knows Jarod, and he’s shocked,” Gemini said, frowning his Jarodesque frown and looking around at the others. “Major Charles was shocked too. Is there a social taboo against genetic twinning? Nobody told me that.”

“It’s an idea that will take some getting used to for many people,” the young red-head said gently. Emily, Jarod’s sister. There were a head-spinning number of relatives at this point. Jarod was lucky to have so many people to care about him, and willing to risk themselves to get him back. “You are the first and only human clone, James, so far as we know.”

“Really? But I was born almost fifteen years ago, and the monkeys a couple years before that. I thought there would at least be younger ones by now?” Broots noticed that the girl, named Miriam Jarod had told him, stepped up from behind her grandfather and took Gemini’s hand. Immediately the boy’s worried face softened, as if her presence had an anti-anxiety effect. Broots too could use a good hand-holding right about now.

“The Centre has never released anything about their breakthroughs with cloning technology,” Annalise said. “There was publicity around a cloned sheep here a few years ago, and a lot of hand-wringing over just that. I think for a human, shit would really hit the fan.”

“Sheep? But domestic animals are easy subjects for nuclear transfer,” Gemini said. “Why would that be controversial?”

“Many people believe that their genetic material is an essential part of who they are,” Emily said. “So if you clone someone, it’s as if you’ve stolen their soul.”

“What’s a soul?” Gemini asked.

Major Charles made a noise halfway between a huff and a moan. Emily rested her hand on her Dad, a warning, or to restrain him. Clearly the clone thing was just as much of bombshell among Jarod’s family as it was for Broots. Annalise, with an aggrieved expression on her face, stepped forward into the awkward silence.

“Okay, let’s drop the metaphysics for now. We’re all here to help Broots gather information on Jarod, in order to formulate a plan for rescue. Got it? Now how about we all sit down, and you fill us in on what you’ve got.”

“Right. Yeah. Come in everyone, or, uh, come in more,” Broots said. “Debbie’s at basketball camp and then at a friend’s house overnight, so you can stay as long as you need to through tomorrow. After that maybe I can send some of you home with equipment and assignments that don’t need the Internet.” He eyed Charles and Emily, both carrying DSA cases and duffel bags with the Pakor discs. Jarod had told him it was a motherlode of information, in the brief time they had spoken before he was recaptured. And even before getting all that stuff, Broots still hadn’t finished decrypting everything Angelo had brought with him in _his_ breakout from the Centre. Hmm, possibly a job for the cloning-is-totally-normal kid, assuming he had a fraction of Jarod’s skills. The boy seemed like he knew his way around a Centre database or two.

“Okay. Here’s a recap of what we know,” Broots said. “Jarod’s been out of the medward for five days now. I managed to get a copy of his medical records from there days ago, and there are nurse’s notes on bandages and meds and stuff, but no location. So we know he’s alive, but we don’t know where in the building.”

“Are you sure he’s still _in_ the building?” Emily asked. “They were keen to transfer Gemini pretty quick.”

“Well, not a hundred percent sure, but I would guess so. They aren’t going to make that mistake again, considering what happened last time. Um, sorry kid.”

“I’m not sorry,” Gemini deadpanned. Broots couldn’t tell if that was supposed to be a joke or not. “They were going to send me and Dr. Sydney to Africa to do simulations for the rest of my life. I’d rather be here.”

“Sydney,” Angelo murmured. His only words since entering the house. Broots was honestly surprised at how good he looked, how _normal_ compared to the freak-out Angelo of yesteryear, although he still had an aura of quiet spaciness to him. His family really had helped him gain some stability.

Annalise looked at her cousin. “Yeah, where _is_ Sydney? Maybe they’re both just down in the sim lab together. If we follow Sydney, Jarod will probably be there too.”

“Ahhh, there’s the problem,” said Broots. “Sydney’s disappeared too. I’ve got a ton on Miss Parker, she, uh, dropped a grenade with the Triumvirate on her way out. It’s pretty funny, actually, she…”

Annalise held up hand to stop him. “Sydney, Broots. I really couldn’t give rat’s ass about your old boss, considering she’s the one who got us into this mess. But Sydney’s missing?”

“Right.” Actually, Broots couldn’t help speculating that the feeling was probably mutual, as far as Miss Parker was concerned. He wondered what would happen if the two women ever met. It was kind of an amusing thought. “Yeah, so, there still hasn’t been any sign of Sydney at his home or office since we picked up Gemini. His email and phone messages, however, have been given a priority one screening by the tech department. Ordered by Lyle. That’s, um, not good.”

“Why not good? Aren’t they constantly monitoring all the phones and email anyway?” Emily asked.

“It’s kind of don’t ask, don’t tell monitoring, normally,” Broots said. “I mean, I hacked a ton of emails while I was there, I can’t really talk smack about corporate privacy. But this is open. It’s the kind of thing they do right before a T-board. I’d guess Sydney’s in trouble over Gemini’s escape. Although they are going deep with the emails, back to like, 1995.”

“Since before Jarod broke out,” Annalise muttered. “Maybe they are trying to figure out if Sydney helped him get out the first time, before they him let back onto the Pretender project.”

“Did he?” Broots asked, now genuinely curious. “I mean, he told us exactly where to get Gemini, so did he help Jarod escape?”

“No,” Annalise said. Not a guess, said with confidence, with knowledge of what happened straight from Jarod’s mind. Creepy, these telepaths. “Sydney genuinely believed Jarod needed protection from the world. Jarod thought he only changed his mind after he’d been out awhile and obviously could function just fine. Plus he wasn’t sure how much Sydney knew about what they were doing with his simulations. He thought Sydney might be complicit in their misuse. Which, I gotta say, is still very much an open question, despite Sydney’s recent road to Damascus conversion.”

“Sydney hurts. Jarod hurts,” Angelo muttered. His eyes were closed and he was rocking slightly. _Freak-out time_ , thought Broots. He expected Annalise to reach over for the mental shoring up, but to his surprise, it was Emily who took Angelo’s hand.

“Do you need me to intervene?” Annalise asked quietly. Emily shook her head, her eyes now tightly shut too. “Can you tell if they are together, Tim?”

“He thinks yes. He thinks it’s Lyle.”

Annalise shirked back, as if the very syllable of the name frightened her. “As you said, Broots, that’s not good. Can you track _him_ in the building?”

“Lyle doesn’t use email. Paper everything if he can get away with it. But…” He tilted his head, formulating a plan already. “This might be a good time renew efforts to crack security’s key card log. The new security system since Jarod’s been out is magnetic key cards, you see. There’s a log of every door that each card opens, even attempted openings. So they can tell if people are trying to get into unauthorized areas. I’ve been thinking of targeting the system.”

“Yeah, I remember Jarod used those cards to break out Tim,” Annalise said. “Didn’t he infect the security system with some worm or virus thing to add them as authorized users?”

“Yes! Oh God, that was such a pain to clean up.” Broots looked at her with a sheepish grin. “You know, I could, uh, probably modify that little script for our own purposes. You wouldn’t happen to have any of Jarod’s stuff, would you?”

Major Charles bent over one of the stuffed bags and pulled out Jarod’s battered, souped-up laptop. “You mean, like this?”

“Yeah,” Broots said, amazed. Like walking into a sacred temple, cracking Jarod’s private computer. “But he probably had like five layers of encryption on it, so anyone happen to know the key?”

Annalise leaned over and lightly rested her hand on Broots’ own. He jumped. On the edges of his mind he felt a gentle probe, rather like a tickle to the brain, testing him for readiness. Then a long list of letters and numbers popped into his head. A truly random string, it would take _years_ to crack such a passkey.

_No secrets from the telepath,_ she said, mind to mind. In awe, Broots had to agree.


	5. Timeloop

It was peaceful at this farm, Emily reflected as she lounged in her niece’s treehouse. Too calm in fact, for it lulled them into passive complacency. For as much as she wanted to storm the gates and rip back her brother from the jaws of hell, in truth she had no more power than all those years growing up, knowing exactly where Jarod was but unable to do anything productive. Emily knew her father was determined to find a new solution this time, especially since they had help. Privately, though, she suspected that they wouldn’t be able to do anything to spring Jarod, unless he was able to escape himself all over again. And with Sydney hanging over his head, there was a possibility that Jarod might not even try. Emily had always suspected a certain amount of brainwashing must have occurred for her brother, otherwise why wouldn’t he have escaped earlier like Kyle?

In fact, from Tim’s mind she scraped together confirmation that Sydney had been instrumental in imprisoning Jarod, in his own calm, persistent, Stockholm Syndrome way. Tim could hardly keep a coherent narrative straight in his head for more than a few seconds, but even just from the torrent of the raw images and emotions she gleaned quite a bit about the kidnapped children’s lives, and Sydney and Raines in particular.

That hot summer day, two weeks after her brother’s recapture, Emily was lounging with the Data Brigade in Miriam’s well-built fort. It was an odd place to crack data, given that the little house was completely unconnected to the grid, and was powered exclusively by wind and fir tree movements and possibly some solar wizardry which her young engineer niece had cobbled together from spit and junkyard parts. But the treehouse had the advantage of being private, and away from Annalise’s allergy to electronic devices, and had surprisingly good cell reception considering they were on Hilltop, Nowhere. Plus it was comfortable and beautiful, with a view overlooking the small valley where the Wallace farm resided, and smelled of pine trees and wafting blueberries up from the local fields.

The two kids were hard at work on their respective jerry-rigged computers, one with a DSA player attached with its guts spilling out, the other with Tim’s pilfered Centre laptop hooked up in serial with a bunch of other hard drives. James was working on the biological data they had stolen from Pakor, while Miriam had been assigned to sort through emails Broots had retrieved from a Centre annex regarding Sydney and Lyle. Emily had her own laptop too, plus Jarod’s satellite phone for a certain amount of Internet access, but at the moment she sprawled out on the treehouse’s couch with her hand resting lightly on Tim’s. She could be working the tech angle, but more and more as the days went on she let her mind run free with Tim’s through the Centre tunnels. The kids, her father, and Broots could all handle the hack angle, but Tim was the only one here at the farm who knew the Centre itself inside and out. Of course they also had Jarod’s DSAs of his simulations — Annalise handed them the case from under her bed with a distasteful ‘good riddance’ — which were great for studying Sydney in action, not so great for understanding the what was going on behind the scenes, or in the corners of the Centre where Jarod was forbidden. It seemed important somehow, that _knowledge_ of the place should be passed on, so its sordid history would not be repeated ad infinitum like a malevolent time loop. It might already be on repeat, she suspected with horror.

 _Show me the sim lab,_ Emily thought for the fiftieth time, and simultaneously pictured it, high up from the western ventilation where Angelo used to watch. The mental image was the important part to trigger Tim’s memories, but the words were still instinctive to Emily, and she also suspected that repetition might help reform Tim’s links to language. She pictured Sydney too, as he looked from a random DSA disk from the early 80s. Kyle ran away in 1987, when he was 26 years old. The question continued to bug her — why didn’t Jarod do the same? Why was the man who spent his first two years of freedom helping people paralyzed into inaction well into his thirties?

Tim took her crude image and popped it to life in her head. Younger Jarod was there too, looking halfway between James’ teenage features and the adult she had briefly known. They were doing something simulation-related, either prep or debriefing based on the stack of papers on the table in front of Jarod. As usual in Tim’s memories, their speech was garbled gibberish, although you could tell they were talking. It may have been a composite memory, for the same scene in the same location had played out many, many times.

 _No Jarod,_ thought Emily, and she mentally shrank him down and shoved him out of the image like a cartoon character balloon being sucked out of the room. Tim shot back amusement at the funny image. _What does Sydney do by himself?_

Maybe too many words, but Tim got the gist. He showed her Sydney walking up to his office, which was located on a upper balcony level overlooking the sim lab. From the vantage point behind the grate it was difficult to make out anything coherent, though.

 _Walk me over to his office. Is there another tunnel over there?_ She “pointed” at Sydney’s office, then imagined crawling away from the grate opening.

There was another tunnel, but it involved going down to the sim lab’s main floor on Sublevel 15, around a couple of corners and back up again. The access shafts on that side were much smaller, so Angelo hadn’t been over there very often. He nevertheless showed her how to do it in principle, and stuck an imaginary leg out of the grate to demonstrate that it wasn’t big enough for a grown person squeeze through.

 _Not an escape route, I get it. Is this Sydney_ _’s only office? Where do people go when they want privacy, a conference room or something?_ She pictured a generic boardroom with a long plastic-covered particle board table and empty chairs. Tim responded with a flurry of images of various meeting rooms, dozens piled up on one another. There were grim underlit ones on the sublevels, brightly lit open air spaces in the Tower, closets that functioned as storage spaces for furniture, tiny windowless offices where employees retreated to avoid the omnipresent cameras. And the last image, the one Tim lingered over with an overlay of fear, was a small grimy amphitheater with two tables lined up like a “T”, with weirdly lit seats curved on steps above the table. A couple of small rooms, which Emily somehow knew were holding cells, were visible off to one side.

 _What is this?_ Emily asked. _Interrogation?_

In her mind, she felt his assent. _T-board,_ he thought in words. Sharply, the phrase had some extra meaning in Centre lingo. Broots had mentioned something about a T-board as an internal investigation, come to think of it.

_Jarod interrogated? Maybe he_ _’s here?_

_No._ He flashed back then to the sim lab and shuffled through images: Jarod injected with something, Jarod Pretending to be hurt, Jarod screaming, Sydney soothing, Jarod begging to be let out, Sydney presses a button. Emily willed herself not to fling her hand away to drop the horrible memories, and took a breath. Out in the real world she vaguely heard Miriam was saying something, had felt their distress across the room, but stuck in Tim’s mind Emily couldn’t grasp the words. Tim withdrew the images but let the empathetically-absorbed pain linger between them, unable or unwilling to fully suppress it.

 _Okay, I get it, they torture Jarod in the sim lab,_ she thought when she had caught her breath. _So who gets it in a T-board?_

Here Tim presented an interesting series of images, and again it was hard to tell whether the memories were of discrete instances or a compilation of many interrogations. But among dozens of people, Raines appeared several times, Mr. Parker, a very young Lyle, a less young Sydney. Once, recently, Broots, Miss Parker and Sydney were dragged in together. Jarod, Kyle, and Angelo himself never appeared before the board. Lab rats were apparently below tribunal status.

_What were the old ones of Sydney and Raines about?_

It was a tough question to visualize, and even tougher for a man with limited language to answer. Emily wasn’t surprised when Tim responded _Not sure._ But behind that there were some more images: A gunshot, a scream. A blurry vision of himself strapped to a hated chair, little, full of pain. Alarms blaring. Jarod, at his current age, dropping through a ventilation shaft.

 _Betrayal and disruption, I get it. Did they do a T-board on Sydney after Jarod escaped?_ She replayed the memory of Jarod dropping through the tunnel, then followed it with Sydney at the T-board table. A question mark hung in the air.

He changed the picture to an interrogation of three terrified employees, whom Emily didn’t recognize. From the spying angle she could make out Sydney in the observation deck, along with Raines and the elder Parker.

_So they didn_ _’t blame Sydney back then. Interesting. I guess they figured if he was going to help the kidnapped children he would have done it before then. You think Gemini is really what changed their minds?_

_Too many words. Tired._ Tim withdrew the emotional link back out to the periphery of her mind, although he didn’t drop her hand. Emily had done this enough times that she knew what he wanted next. It was ceasing to be strange, having an empath sink into her mind.

She indicated permission wordlessly, giving him a signal that all verbalization was over. Instantly the floodgates of sensation opened, rushing through her and overwhelming her own minimal input. Emily knew she was sitting on a couch, her head on a pillow, Tim sitting next to her, their hands intertwined, Jarod’s kids sitting over to one side. She now knew that there was a blustery wind on top of the great tree the house leaned on, that the chickens down the road were hot and sleepy, that Miriam had distracted James from his task by sending some kind of commentary on the two of them but James didn’t mind, and that Tim felt relief to be Tim again and not dragged back to being Angelo, which he thought was a danger every time he put his mind back inside the Centre. She could see herself from the outside, eyes tightly closed, her red hair almost shiny bright popping out in the dark room. Then Tim closed his own eyes and the double sensation of watching herself vanished, and Tim sank in further, relieved to be sharing the burden of stimulation with another person, and no longer be alone. It felt like floating, or being surrounded, and sometimes Emily lost track of where she ended and the massive river of input began.

“You two feel weird when you get like that,” she heard Miriam comment out loud, and the meaning of the words came through her while the sensate reading of affectionate amusement came through him. Then James’ emotions rose, he evidently a bit shocked that Miriam would comment on that, followed by her lobbing back some sarcastic teasing and bringing his mood back up. In only two weeks they had forged their own type of link, in its way as intimate and interdependent as if they’d been together their entire lives. To Tim’s mind their connection popped out as if it were a neon sign.

“Everybody’s weird, join the club,” Emily said.

Then Tim’s attention wandered from the kids to the buzzing of life outside, and Emily let herself be carried along. Almost like flying, except there was no plane, just wind and air and no decisions, existing and being. They said her mind was soothing, but she hadn’t told the telepaths that their minds were just as comforting. Not in words, although Tim didn’t need words to understand. It was as if her mind had been released: freed.

  


* * * * *

  


It was getting to be a tradition that the family gathered for a war meeting right after dinner, often with Broots on the phone. Everyone reported on what they’d found that day, and then arguing would commence on the best strategy forward to rescue Jarod. Broots usually took the conservative side of things, arguing to gather as much information as they could, and possibly doing the deed by feeding vital information to Jarod from the outside and letting him free himself. Major Charles usually argued, often with Annalise’s surprising support, for direct action. Emily wasn’t convinced which camp she belonged in yet. The Centre was a fortress in more ways than one, and most direct assaults on the Centre resulted in disaster for the would-be attackers. But letting her brother rot until he escaped on his own was a sickening thought. What good was it to have family and loved ones if they couldn’t help you out in times of need?

“So, what did everyone come up with today?” Annalise asked, as the group gathered in their cozy living room at dusk. “Any breakthroughs on how to get a message to Jarod or Sydney, Broots?”

“N..No, they’re still incommunicado,” Broots stammered. “Not gonna be able to do much until Syd’s access to the internal network is restored. I found more evidence that some kind of sim is going on, but they haven’t finished it and Mr. Parker hasn’t received a final report. Uh, you got anything on the emails I sent you, Miriam?”

Miriam straightened up. She was sitting on the floor at the base of a couch with her legs crossed, James next to her holding her hand. “I cracked 300 of them today. Most of them were really boring memos, but there was one from Medical that said subject Pt006 wouldn’t be up even on crutches until at least the end of the month. That’s Jarod, right?”

“Welcome to corporate America,” Broots deadpanned. “Yeah, that Jarod’s main code, although sometimes they just say ‘Project Pretender’. You know, like James was Project Gemini.”

“That’s another two weeks until they’re estimating Jarod might be able to even hobble on his own volition,” Annalise said. “Anybody have reason to believe this time frame is anything different? It would be a lot easier to spring Jarod if he can walk on his own. James?”

They all looked at James, the boy with entire medical textbooks crammed into his brain. He tipped his head as if to think, his usual move when asked a direct question. The kid was adjusting all right, especially after Annalise ordered him to spend several mellow days doing nothing but wandering the farm with Miriam and reading books. He was still jumpy when asked to perform, though, despite obviously wanting to be part of the rescue effort.

“I think it is an extremely optimistic estimate, given what I saw of the injury,” James said. “It looked like the femur had been broken. There would likely be vascular damage, in which case he’s lucky they were able to save the leg. I’d give it at least six weeks from the point of injury for the bone to fuse and be able to hold up some weight. Probably another month beyond that for him to minimally walk on it again.”

“Well, that’s not good,” Annalise said.

“I, uh, hate to say it, but a couple of months breather might be a good thing,” Broots put in. “The Centre often drops its guard when everything goes to ground. And if I know Jarod, he knows how to bide his time. I mean, we’re still not even sure where they’re keeping him.”

Without thinking, Emily found herself saying, “He’s in the same place he’s always been. In the sim lab, with Sydney.”

The rest of them all stared at her in surprise at her certainty, except for Tim. Over the phone, Broots stammered, “How… how do you know, they could have…”

“We just know.” She didn’t want to say, _Angelo intuits the Centre and Jarod has been put back in his proper place,_ not in front of his family, although that would convince Broots more than anything. “Jarod’s cooperating, at least superficially. You said yourself there was a sim.”

“Sure, but… well, okay.” Broots paused a moment, like he was frantically typing in the background. “The sim lab’s on SL-15. Jarod’s old quarters are on the same level, around the corner on the west side. Does Ange…Tim think that he’s being kept in the same quarters, or something more secure? They can’t be in the sim lab 24-7, but Jarod escaped from his old quarters, so I’d guess… somewhere else?”

Over their connection, Tim sent her the mental equivalent of a shrug. The sim lab was the major association in his mind. “He’s not sure,” Emily said. “They’re in the sim lab most of the time.”

“Right. Huh. I wouldn’t think Jarod would give in so quickly.”

“He would if he thought it gained him something,” Annalise said quietly. “Time to heal, protection for someone, access to something, room to think. You said yourself that Jarod knows how to bide his time, and you are not wrong.”

“Protection,” murmured Emily’s father. Then Charles suddenly spoke up. “Broots. Is it possible they know where we are? Because that would be something Jarod would cooperate over. He’d do anything to protect his family.”

“ _No,”_ Annalise shot back. Even without Tim’s empathic abilities, Emily could sense her terror stretching across the room. “I don’t care what kind of deal was cut, if Lyle knew where I was, where Miriam was, he wouldn’t hesitate to drag us in behind Jarod’s back. And Raines would do anything to have his little lab subjects Angelo and Gemini back too. These people know nothing of ethics or promises. Jarod knows this.”

Down on the floor, James blinked in agreement. “Mr. Raines would not honor an agreement if it was to his advantage. But Dr. Sydney was very attached to Jarod, I think.”

“And vice versa,” Annalise said, nodding. “Yeah, Sydney might be enough to get Jarod to work, at least on something innocuous. I mean, he’s not going to build a nuclear bomb for Sydney, but if they put something easy in front of him, something that helped other people too, he might calculate that going along was worth it.”

Next to her on the couch, Tim’s mind was flashing, but not over Lyle or Raines or even Sydney. There was one thing that was _not_ in its proper place at the Centre these days. Miss Parker had left, so that was a change. The building itself noted her absence. And Emily suddenly noticed that Broots hadn’t answered Charles’ question.

“Broots…” she started. “What about the address? Is it possible someone at the Centre has it?”

“Ummmmmm…” he replied, and the tone was so guilty that every single person in the room shot their head up. “Okay, fine. Now that I know where you all are, I think Miss Parker probably has it. Maybe. I cracked the Douglas County property records right before Jarod, uh, nabbed us.”

Both Major Charles and Annalise looked at each other and groaned at the same time.

“Well it’s been seven months!” Broots continued in protest. “If she hasn’t raided you yet, she probably decided to leave you alone.”

“Or, just hold onto it to have something to hang over Jarod’s head!” Annalise shot back. “Ever think of that, genius?”

“Fine, right, that too. But Miss Parker does have a soft spot for kids. I don’t think she wanted to bring Miriam in.”

“She let me go,” James said in his soft voice. “She had to choose between me and him, and she choose to let me go.”

“She could have chosen to let you both go,” Annalise said. “Instead she shot Jarod because it was to her advantage. How can we trust a born and bred Centre lackey not to serve us up at some future point for the same reason?”

“Miss Parker,” Tim muttered. Oddly, he wasn’t thinking of her directly, but of her mother, who had been kind to him once very long ago. Emily now knew there were places in the Centre where the tortured soul of Catherine Parker saturated the very walls. “Go see. Help.”

Annalise flung up her hands in exasperation. “You’ve got to be kidding,” she said. _“You_ go see, Tim, Warrior Woman likes you.”

“Okay,” he replied, and Emily could sense his rising happiness and amusement. Like a nagging problem had been solved, and also an adventure awaited.

 _You_ _’re nuts Tim,_ Emily thought at him, and showed him a nice visualization of his own head exploding into peanuts for good measure. He grinned.

“Emily comes too,” he said.

“You do need a babysitter. And a comfortable mind pillow,” Emily agreed, and grinned back, even as her father glowered at them for the reckless proposal. Tackle the Centre head-on, indeed.


	6. The brick wall of reality

It was amazing to Jarod how easily he slid back into his old role. Even with his leg immobilized and himself stuck in a wheelchair, even with Sydney trapped with him and living at the Centre, Jarod’s mind still snapped back into the place the moment he entered the sim lab.

Of course, now he didn’t just glibly take the Centre’s word for it that the simulations were for a benign purpose. In fact a decent chunk of his prep time was now focused on the likely outcomes of the sim in a crude cost-benefit analysis: Cost — potential harm to human beings in the world, benefit — his own children and people he knew, surviving for another day. Cost — advantaging the Centre in any way, which granted them resources to do harm in other areas. Benefit — Sydney wouldn’t be harmed today. Benefit — his first sim back did hold the potential to save some lives, just as Lyle promised. Cost — another bit of Jarod’s soul worn down through his caving in.

Truthfully, Jarod knew he’d forfeited his soul the second he was dragged back through the Centre’s art deco doors. Now it was merely a matter of survival until he was healed enough to break out again. With Sydney in tow, apparently. A strange, strange reality to wake up to.

Sydney’s reaction to being held prisoner by his own employer was mellow, even by the “Sydney standards” Jarod carried around in his head. The two of them had been given cots in the southeast corner in the sim lab, and that space plus the small washroom off to one side of the lab had been converted into their new home. Jarod expected at least a little psychological stress on his old teacher’s part, but to his surprise, Sydney just shrugged, converted some scraps from an old simulator into his personal desk, piled it with red notebooks that he used to scribble in for something or other, and flopped onto his cot without resignation every night.

Jarod avoided speaking, unless he was directly addressed, for a full three days. A petty rebellion, he knew, but a self-satisfying one. But as there was no one to talk to - even Lyle was giving him a wide berth, and the nurses evidently had been sworn to a code of silence — the loneliness began to wear Jarod down. Just like he was a kid again, and couldn’t go more than a couple of days without deviating from a task. On the fourth morning, after acting nothing but curt and overly attentive to the sim for hours, Jarod finally broke from their sterile work routine.

“You seem to be taking to captivity so well,” Jarod said out of the blue, glancing up from his stack of dull soil reports. The words tumbled out, accusing, angry even though Sydney had nothing at all to imprison him this time around.

Sydney straightened up from his journal with barely a perturbed eyebrow. “Well, I was down in Donoterase for six months,” he told him, giving Jarod that annoying — and comforting — enigmatic smile. In the battle of wills, Sydney always could hold out longer. The wounds on his face from the first day had faded to garish green, with one significant gash along his right brow. It would leave a scar, Jarod suspected; the Centre had neglected to properly stitch him up, leaving it as a permanent warning and sign of disobedience. “That place does give one clarity of perspective on how to occupy time. It was made clear to me that it was not a voluntary assignment, not if I wanted to continue working with Gemini.”

“How was he? I mean, what’s he like?” Jarod asked, softening, unable to resist his curiosity about the boy trapped in the basement all those years. His son, impossibly the same as him and yet not.

As they were talking, two sweepers walked in and silently plunked down two shakes in between piles of articles on their makeshift table. Again just like his childhood, Jarod was being fed a semipurified diet, although now Sydney was forced to gag it down too, in another sign of his prisoner status. Today Jarod could taste that they had upped his protein intake, probably to promote muscle retention. The bitter acridity of narcotics was still present as well, and Jarod inwardly laughed at Lyle’s unsubtle attempts to use addiction against him as a backup plan. For now, Jarod was fine with the extra pain relief, as the leg still felt like an itchy inferno.

Sydney took a sip from his shake, and gave it a frown as the sweepers silently retreated form the room. “He looked like you, but his personality was not the same. He’s inquisitive, highly intelligent of course, always looking to absorb information about the world. But he was also emotionally stunted, I’m sorry to say.”

“And what, I wasn’t?” Jarod shot back. “It’s tough to genuinely express your emotions when you are forced to please your captors and what passes for a father figure.”

“And yet, you managed to anyway,” Sydney gently said. “You never had trouble expressing yourself, at fourteen or older.”

Jarod downed the rest of his lunch and shook his head. “You’re wrong, Sydney. I may have let it burst out from time to time, but for the most part I buried all the hurt and loneliness deep down. I told myself it was worth it to help people, my purpose in life, but that was all just a lie, wasn’t it?”

“I didn’t think it was a lie at the time,” Sydney said. “And it’s certainly not a lie now. I’m proud of what you’ve accomplished, Jarod. But with Gemini…” He paused and glanced at the cameras, and then seemed to mentally shrug, as if he were letting go of the lies and secrets he’d carried for decades. “Truth be told, Gemini was not much of a Pretender. The potential to be a brilliant scientist, yes, but he always approached every problem from the outside, not from the heart of it. In that respect he was quite the opposite of you. But with Raines raising him that was a horrific secret to bear.”

“Not a Pretender?” Jarod murmured, fascinated despite himself. “I would not have predicted that. I thought genetics was the main factor in the Pretender trait. Isn’t that why the Centre has chased my family all these years? My brother had it, my sister likely has it, my da…”

He cut off, not wanting to bring Miriam into the conversation in front of Lyle’s leering cameras. Every scrap of their conversation was likely being analyzed for clues to his children’s whereabouts. But Sydney caught it anyway. “Your daughter?” he asked softly. “You think she is, or would have been, a potential Pretender?”

“She doesn’t know,” Jarod said curtly. “Or, at least, I don’t want her to care. I don’t want her to think about herself that way, like her destiny is in some kind of Centre-built box. My sister too, although she’s more aware of the life she narrowly escaped from.”

“How can you tell? Does the girl have some of Angelo’s abilities?”

Jarod recognized Sydney’s demeanor shifting over to researcher mode, like he was mentally taking beady-eyed notes. He inwardly sighed. If Sydney lived to be a hundred, he wouldn’t be able to give up his impulse to poke and prod his favorite science projects, even if he wasn’t malicious about it. There were times Jarod wondered what would have happened if Sydney had been the one handle Annalise’s project during her time of capture by the Centre, or even little Timmy’s back in the day. Sydney had always had a strong interest in the paranormal; he was more likely than any other Centre researcher to have parsed out the Wallace’s unique abilities, given enough access. But Jarod’s analysis indicated that the Centre had balked at giving Sydney some of the more obvious kidnapping victims. They sensed, correctly, that even Sydney had ethical limits.

“ _The girl_ is a real human being living her life, and I intend to keep it that way,” Jarod finally said. “Same with Gemini. I hope he’s adjusting, with some love and outside help.”

“Do you think Angelo’s family will actually love him, and not view him as a monstrous science experiment?”

Jarod glared at Sydney, before letting his emotions roll over to fatigue and sadness. _Unable to escape the box. The box always survives_. _“_ They know more than most what it’s like to live as the objects of some mad power struggle, and to live full lives despite the shadow of control. You don’t think Annalise intimately knows what was done to Angelo, knows every demented procedure Raines put on him? On a _child_? Some of it is even gone, years permanently erased or suppressed or jumbled by overstimulation.”

His overly grandiose words were starting to slur. The nutritional shake had been more heavily dosed than Jarod guessed. The leg hurt less as a result, but now his thought processes were falling down a cascade of free association, unable to maintain the bigger picture. Time to Pretender up, he thought with amusement. With Sydney’s soothing prompts he could literally sim through anything, sleep and drugging included.

“Don’t we have a sim to work on, Sydney?” Jarod asked. “Enough of my family, give me something easy to work on. Please.”

 _Keep me distracted,_ was what he really meant, but Sydney would know. Sydney had kept him distracted for thirty-five years. May as well not stop now. But now, in actuality, Sydney seemed reluctant to move on, and stared at Jarod, as if trying to decide whether to press on or shuffle papers on his desk. Maybe he wanted to talk about family, about Nicholas and Gemini and Jarod’s own stolen childhood. Maybe Sydney was as over simming as Jarod was. Even the most stalwart scientists could hope for a career change.

“Do you think of Angelo as your family?” Sydney quietly asked, ignoring the sim at hand.

“Yes. One thing the Wallaces taught me, you can never have too many cousins.” He chuckled, and his head rolled to one side. “His name’s not even Angelo, not anymore. He can switch between them, you know, between Tim and Angelo. They — we — fixed him that much. His mindspeech is much better. Even Emily had helped him, last I heard.” Jarod’s body lolled to the right, following his head, and he mentally kicked himself for his chemically-enhanced loose lips. He wasn’t one hundred percent sure that the Centre knew what his sister’s name was up until now. Had it been revealed in the phone tap of St. Catherine’s? He couldn’t think.

“Tell me, Sydney, what sims did you ask Gemini to do?” Jarod asked, desperate for a distraction now. He hoped Sydney would pick up on his new train of thought, and leave the immediate present alone. He didn’t think he could completely eliminate incriminating chitchat, unless he shut down completely, which could be misconstrued as “noncooperation.” He had to keep talking, even about trivialities. Had he revealed any other buried information? Had he said Miriam’s name, or that the Wallaces were going by the last name ‘Fell,’ or mentioned Oregon? Bury it, bury it again.

Sydney shrugged, and Jarod willed that to be a sign he’d caught on to the shift in subject. “I made them up for the most part, because the facilities were inadequate. Actual outcomes were irrelevant. The appearance of progress was what mattered.”

 _Don_ _’t burn your bridges at the Centre, Sydney,_ Jarod thought. _Don_ _’t give up and be too honest. I need you to ingratiate yourself with the powers that be once again._ Their greatest probability of escape lay in Sydney getting out of the damned sim lab.

“Oh come on, he’s my clone, he couldn’t have been that bad,” Jarod protested, Pretend-mocking now.

“You’re right. He was faster than you at physics and engineering problems. Probably because he was deriving the answer from some means other than simulating the scenario,” Sydney said, the faint smile appearing again. “”I never was able to determine how exactly he was doing it, not that it mattered. I think James simply had his own type of genius.”

“You named him James?”

“No, the staff at Donoterase did. They liked him very much. Raines wasn’t the only one watching over him all these years.”

“I’m glad,” Jarod said softly.

Then, after a long pause, a question popped into his head. “Sydney, can I ask you something? In the spirit of our new honest relationship,” he said, a tad sarcastically.

Sydney waved a hand, and then crossed them over his chest again. “Of course.”

“Did you really think I was so fragile that I’d crumble in the real world?” Or, what Jarod meant to ask, _why was your own simulation so wrong, Sydney? Why was mine, about myself?_

Sydney gazed at him, unflinching in the face of their old unspoken pain. “I thought your talents were best served by unbroken attention at the Centre, without the distractions and excitement of the real world. I’m still not convinced that this was incorrect. And, for all the good that you’ve done over the past three years, does it match what you could have accomplished with the full resources of the Centre behind you, instead of against you?”

“That’s not the point, Sydney,” Jarod protested. “I’m not a monk, voluntarily living a sequestered life. I didn’t ask to be locked up or give you permission to raise me that way. And given that the Centre has been determined to use my work for evil purposes, it’s probably a good thing that I never voluntarily threw myself in alignment with their full power.”

“But now you will? We still have a simulation in front of us. Develop techniques for soil rebuilding in a semi-arid steppe climate damaged by overgrazing and overpopulation. That isn’t a worthy use of your talents, one that could improve the lives of thousands of people?”

“It is for now,” Jarod whispered.

He shut his eyes to Sydney, as the full weight of his cooperation crashed down on him. The devil always hit you up with a good cause. Jarod had vowed to struggle until his last breath before becoming a meek prisoner again, and yet here he was, playing the Centre’s game. For Angelo, for his children, for the rest of both families. As Sydney said, it _was_ a worthy cause, but it still felt like a betrayal of every ounce of self-respect he’d built up in his head since his escape. Even with the noble goal of his family in mind, even with the knowledge that he only needed to hold out for a few months at most before the Centre slipped, Jarod wasn’t sure he could endure it. Having tasted freedom, he didn’t foresee that even the great Pretender could fake it that much.

  


* * * * *

  


Miss Parker sipped a spiked espresso at an outdoor cafe, while perusing her morning emails on her newfangled corporate-perked Blackberry pager. New York in June could get oppressive like an angry wet dog, but at the moment there was a soft breeze accompanying the sharp end of spring weather, and the city couldn’t be more pleasant. She’d only escaped the Centre clutches a little over a week ago, but it already felt like a brand new existence, one filled with shiny new possibilities for the second half of her life. Mama would be proud, she thought. Miss Parker had finally broken off to forge her own identity, exactly what Catherine wanted all those years ago.

Through some unknown sense she glanced up, and standing before her, like a mirage from a grim past, was a familiar man with irregularly chopped hair and rumpled clothes, and a less familiar young red-headed woman with a steely look of hidden nervousness on her face. It took Miss Parker a second to place Angelo, so out of context he seemed, standing like a perfectly normal person on a sidewalk in New York City.

“Miss Parker,” he said, smiling a weird Angelo smile, and her mind snapped to the reality that Mush Head really was not a demented delusion escaping from the past.

“Angelo?” she ventured, with a few seconds of uncharacteristic hesitation. “Fancy meeting you here. I take it this isn’t a coincidence.” She took a swig of coffee, both for fortification and so as not to make any sudden moves. She wasn’t exactly afraid of Angelo, but no thanks to Raines turned his brain into scrambled eggs, the guy certainly couldn’t be accused of over-predictability.

“He goes by Tim now,” said the ginger, who then plopped herself down in a seat across from Miss Parker without being asked. ”I’m here to keep an eye on him, and it’s best not to trigger the ‘Angelo’ stuff too much, you know?”

“Tim is good,” Angelo agreed with a nod, and sat down and crossed his hands in an identical manner to the red-head.

“By all means, join me,” Miss Parker said with sarcasm. “I can’t even make it a month without the Ghosts of Centre Past haunting me, can I?”

“Nope,” said the woman. “Nobody one hundred percent escapes the Centre; surely you know that better than anybody. Do you remember who I am?”

Up until that second Miss Parker didn’t, but then the association with Jarod’s family snapped into place. She’d first glimpsed the young woman in the back of a taxi two years ago, accompanying Jarod’s mother. Reports from SIS after the incident revealed that the girl was believed to be Jarod’s younger sister, named Emily according to Sister Harriet Tashman, pseudonymed surname unknown. She was also identified as one of the assailants on the Gemini convoy, although Miss Parker hadn’t really been focused on her at the time.

“Jarod’s long lost sister, I’m told,” Miss Parker said. “So it’s true, I take it, that your family is now in league with the telepaths.” Some part of her couldn’t resist putting the puzzle pieces together, as if she was still on the hunt. Three years of habits died hard, even though she had no intention of ratting out Angelo, the clone kid, or even the girlfriend.

“Hey, the Centre’s the one that thought a little cross-family breeding would be fun,” Emily said. “We’re just following up in the direction of natural alliances. You know why we are here, right?”

Miss Parker sighed, and tapped the side of her mini mug with her deftly curved fingernails. “You want some kind of dish on Jarod, I assume. God, I’ll never be rid of his annoying ass.”

“Considering you’re the one who turned his thigh into a pulp, I think he’s the one who’ll never get rid of you,” Emily shot back.

“Jarod hurts,” Angelo added, nodding. “Sydney hurts too.”

“Oh gee kids, try and pile on the guilt. You know it won’t work. Sydney and even Jarod made their choices years ago.”

“You too,” Angelo said slowly, and Miss Parker glared at him. Her choices — Jarod’s shtick was catching. Angelo held out his hand, palm up, as some sort of beckoning invitation that Miss Parker didn’t want to go near with a ten-foot pole.

“Mind speech is easier for him than regular speech,” said Emily. “Hold his hand. He’s not going to bite.”

“I had some interesting reports on my old desk that said otherwise. Not to mention he tried to kill me once, channeling your crazier brother.” In truth, though, Miss Parker had never really feared Angelo, as uncontrollable as he seemed. His behavior was almost always a reflection of the madness surrounding him, and she got the impression that the young woman was doing more than her fair share to ground him. Plus the telepathy thing, creepy as it was, was also unique to the human experience. Live on the knife edge, Miss Parker always thought.

Emily took Angelo’s other hand while she was dithering, evidently talking to him independently. “He wants to tell you that you will be able to hear easily, without effort. Something about a red folder, I’m not sure what that means.”

“We’re both Red Files,” Miss Parker murmured. She rested her hand on his cool one, half-expecting him to grab her and yank her forward. Instead he didn’t so much as twitch, but in her mind she could hear the echos of a rational voice. The voice of Tim, from that time Jarod had temporarily cured him.

 _You can hear,_ he though at her.

 _Yeah?_ Miss Parker shot back. _Don_ _’t go rummaging around in my head now._

_You can_ _’t hear that well. Would hurt. Annalise might dig if here._

“I’m sure she would,” Miss Parker said out loud. “Not like I’m going volunteer to hold hands with Jarod’s girlfriend anytime soon.”

She felt amusement come over the line, and oddly, it lifted her whole mood. _What do you want, Angelo? Why did you risk exposure to come here?_ she asked in mindspeech. Even with no practice, it was remarkably easy. Or maybe he was reading her intentions before she even consciously thought the words.

_Want Jarod. You caught him, promise over. Never said he couldn’t get out again._

_Yeah, I may have thought the same thing on the way out the door. Doesn’t mean I need to help him, though. Or you._

_Want information. Trade, not help. We are good at information. Your self-interest._

_Angelo, if your family was so hot at spying, they would have found you at the Centre decades ago. What have you got that I want?_

_Catherine._

He flashed images at her now, of dozens of documents and memos on Centre letterhead. SIS had suspected Angelo had stolen files on his way out of the Centre, but given all the secret caches of disks and databases laying around, it was impossible to assess what was gone. And she also knew someone had repeatedly hacked the Centre mainframe over the previous six months, which had been blamed on Jarod, but Miss Parker always had a sneaking suspicion that her timid ex-minion was involved.

 _Broots says hi,_ Angelo said, and now Miss Parker was _sure_ he was reading her mind.

 _Okaaay, think I’m done now,_ Miss Parker said, and moved to pull her hand away. But then Emily leaned forward to grab it, so all of a sudden the three of them were connected in a weird disconcerting loop.

_Wait. We have something else. My father._

_What the hell would I want from dear old daddy besides putting a bullet between his eyes? He may have been the one who killed her!_ The words flashed across her mind, undeliberated, and she could feel the woman recoiling a bit from the unbridled anger. Angelo leaned closer, though, as if to absorb the uncontrolled emotional roller coaster.

 _He knows what happened,_ Angelo said, and the honesty of the statement shined through the link. Against all her instincts, she _knew_ he wasn’t lying, that it might not be possible to lie in this state. _Emily’s father was there. He saw._

 _They shot him too,_ Emily added. _Catherine Parker was trying to get Jarod out, so why would he harm her? Don’t believe everything you hear._

_Oh believe me, I won’t._

She yanked her hand away from the others, but the prospect of Major Charles did make her pause. Lying murderer or not, Charles Tully was the one person completely unaffiliated with the Centre who had been there that day, and there were hints that her mother had been in contact with the Tullys well before that fateful day. His perspective might be valuable. Miss Parker could always rely on her instincts to assess whether he was telling the truth or not.

She slid her hand back onto Angelo’s once she made her decision. _I’ll see what he has to say. If it’s worth the value of his son, I’ll help you. You have my word, but I’m the one who will make the call._

 _He’s not going to meet with you in person,_ Emily said. _We’re a little concerned you will shoot him on sight. A video will have to do._

Emily’s internal mind-voice was fainter, more distorted, filtered through Angelo’s brain without a direct touch to Miss Parker. Privately Parker was amazed by the whole surreal conversation, mediated as it was by one extraordinary if Cuisinarted mind. It struck her as absurd that one podunk family of nobodies should have the hidden strength of minor deities, while lesser beings ran with power in forms like the Centre.

 _You got a deal,_ Miss Parker thought, and put her mental weight into it. She knew through the linked circle that they both understood the truth of it.

  



End file.
